


CIRCADIAN RHYTHM

by heartbone (ergo_existence)



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: (unspecified in fic) anorexia, Angst, CONTENT WARNING: eating disordered behaviour, M/M, Renewal, The Power Of Love, Themes:, my favourite tag:, please read Author's Notes for some things to remember about this story, the Fix-It Fic that has brewed in my head for a month
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-19 08:51:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9431492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ergo_existence/pseuds/heartbone
Summary: Mercury is the closest planet to the sun.Or: the story where he takes back what is his, and gives away what isn't. There's always a second chance.





	1. MERCURY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BETA'D BY: serena (miinyuu on AO3, writingprompto on twitter)  
> she allowed me to reflect upon my work, picked up on errors, & reminded me to keep going. thank you. whatever is left wrong with this piece, as much as i love it, is mine.
> 
> SOME THINGS TO REMEMBER BEFORE YOU READ:
> 
> 'prompto argentum' loosely translates from latin to 'quicksilver', which is an archaic medieval term for 'mercury'. yeah. you can all see what i did there.
> 
> tallying up how much love i put into this, it's over 30+ hours. i hope you enjoy it as much as i do, though i'm kind of sick of editing this chapter. i put in five hours last night up until 3AM. then i woke up four hours later. 
> 
> also: i have a long, long history with anorexia. the elements regarding it in the story are handled as best i could with my own experience. this is not a 'person is cured because of love' story in that respect despite the tag. this is a story about pushing back.
> 
> I SHOULD NOTE: i have steered clear of reading ANY promptis fics as i completed this bar one serena wrote because i wanted this to be its own creation & to avoid inadvertently copying anybody. and yes, i very much look forward to combing through everything i've missed.
> 
> SONGS I LISTENED TO WHILST WRITING PART I:  
> this isn't compulsory, but if you like---  
> tash sultana - notion  
> flume - TRUST feat. isabella manfredi  
> purity ring - shuck  
> florence + the machine - i will be  
> joji - medicine  
> ^^^ i had that last one on repeat CONSTANTLY. basically all of those songs though.
> 
>  
> 
> give those a listen, if you're just interested in the sound landscape or know you like those artists. that being said, a bad song can ruin a story you might otherwise enjoy. approach with caution.

### PROLOGUE

****

 

“Go to sleep,” Prompto whispers, silky evening darkness commanding the shadows of the inn’s bedroom. The double bed has enough room for the two of them, the yawning space between their hands enough to make Noctis think about adjusting his body to cover that space. Prompto glides through with his own chaotic gravity, always that breath away yet still the closest that Noctis lets in.

“I’m not tired,” Noctis says, in the same low tone, raspy.

“After a day like today?” Gently, Prompto breathes out a tiny, incredulous laugh. His eyelids slip closed, lashes brushing against the sweetly freckled, fair skin.

Perhaps Noctis could let the natural fatigue take him, but blinking his eyes like a nascent newborn in the morning and waking himself up is forever the hardest part.

 

 

### PART I

****

 

The Crystal shimmers, its eerie incandescence foreboding.

“It’s more of a geode than a cut crystal like the name implies,” Prompto says into the silence and stillness Ardyn’s disappearance had left. His mirage had come and gone, leaving nothing to prove he was even there gracing them with his smug smirk and death sentence; Noctis, just the same, has left no trace. No body.

Gladiolus and Ignis are staring at him. Prompto pays no mind to it as shock encompasses him, jitters making him feel like a hummingbird had taken his heart—yet he feels utterly frozen. The question of the hour posits itself: what do they do without their king? It’s not the first one he’d ask, though. Maybe he’s always been a sentimentalist: what does _he_ do without _Noctis_? He chooses not to voice it. The selfishness will make Gladio frown.

The moment fragments itself into pause after pause. They’re still standing there, like Noctis will crawl out of the Crystal if they just wait long enough and wish hard, cross their fingers. “I wasn’t there,” he mutters, as if Prompto could have reached his arm out and dragged him right back from the celestial stone’s gaping hunger.

“We weren’t there,” Gladio says. “We could’ve—”

“Please save the if’s and but’s for another time. We’re wasting it. Noct told us to stay fighting, so we stayed,” interrupts Ignis, his cadence steely yet steady.  “There is only so much we can do.”

Awkwardly, nobody answers. Gladio is too proud to agree aloud, more than a bow of his head, and Prompto lives off if’s and but’s.

He tries to break in conversation anyway. “So, just to summarise, no Crystal-daemon-banishing powers, no Noctis, no Regalia…what have we got?” Swallowing heavily, he contemplates their situation. There is a certain freedom he is finding, then, in the world turning its vulnerable belly over and everything becoming lost in the vertigo.

Ignis sighs. Gladio’s shrewd gaze finds Prompto. “Ardyn implied he shall return,” Ignis replies, after a moment. He pointedly does not mention the wink Ardyn had thrown them.

“If he wants to beat me,” Ardyn had said, voice carrying in recent memory, teasing as if it’s a children’s game of tag, “he’ll have to sacrifice himself, after all. The cost of winning. I wonder how competitive he truly is.”

Trying to blot out that too fresh wound, Prompto says, “So we wait.”

“So we wait,” Gladio repeats.

“And—and we need to warn people. Help them. The days are getting shorter, and I think that will only keep worsening, guys.”

“Indeed. However, finding our way back is certainly another matter,” Ignis responds. He leans on his cane. “I admit to being slightly overwhelmed by the task ahead of us.”

Gladio snorts. “We’re sitting ducks. We’ll twiddle our thumbs, and Prince Charmless will come around the corner and save the day in no time.”

Prompto silently disagrees with the Prince Charmless nickname. It’s a funny, familiar jibe, but Noctis could walk in with dried drool on his face and bedhead, or scowl at the mention of fishing when he can’t fish, or become sullen and moody when he feels anxious about social interaction, and Prompto would be charmed, anyway, would be charmed twice over.

“You have faith, then,” Ignis surmises.

“I have a feeling he’ll be in there a while, but he’ll drag himself back anyway.”

Looking down at his hands, Prompto realises he still hasn’t stopped shaking. His throat is corked. He can manage this; he’s talked himself down from hysteria on the run more times than he can count. This is his area of expertise.

Ignis’ cane gently hits him in the calf, as if trying to find where Prompto had positioned himself. “Leaving would be prudent.”

“Yeah,” Prompto responds.

Ignis asks if he’s okay. His voice floats, and then—in absentia from his body—Prompto cries. He squashes his hands against his eyes, moving away from the Crystal, precarious feet finding their own way. Utter devastation wracks him and drags him across hot coals. The shock, he knows, didn’t take long to leave to be replaced. Hands grip a railing, and he hardly registers the motion.

“ _He’s. Gone,”_ he grates out. Hot shame follows the grief, his body's pain unable to be controlled, so public and raw after dropping the shield. Gladio and Ignis, both dealing with their own loss, say nothing. Maybe this is where they realise his relationship with Noctis was a little different, when it cracks his voice and makes his bones rattle and he crawls inwards, can’t climb out.

 

*

 

They cut it close, exiting Zegnautus Keep.

Ignis yells out how necessary it is to conserve their potions more than three times; Prompto comes close to being knocked out; Gladio has a hard time keeping the team together.

 _It’s not the same_ is the only thing that Prompto can think, in between the flurry of angling himself amongst the daemons they encounter for the right shots and scores, twisting his body around hits that most people shouldn’t hit, but between polished luck and blurry eyes and a bit of faith Prompto manages it.

He looks over his shoulder, waiting to see Noctis covering his 6 o’clock—coming swinging through with his greatsword—and there’s nothing but a goblin waiting to tear his hide. It’s awful, because he manages and compensates for Noctis’ absence, even if he has to pay attention to the periphery more. He adjusts.

Out of breath, he collapses to the ground outside. Outside—the first breath of fresh air he has tasted since the train. It’s stale, and not at all as invigorating as he had maybe hoped.

“I expected,” he puffs out, “taunting. From Ardyn.”

“He has already made the greatest taunt. Can’t improve on a masterpiece, as it were,” Ignis responds from Prompto’s left.

They made it out. It’s just a question of where they go now. As Prompto had helpfully pointed out earlier, the Regalia is bust. The photos of it might be to contain the upset at losing it—he didn’t expect to grow attached to a car, but he did.

“WWND,” he says, pulling himself together, off from the hard floor. He’s pretending the breakdown over Noctis’ disappearance didn’t happen, because that’s what Ignis and Gladio seem most comfortable with. So is he.

“What?” Gladio asks, hands on hips, expectant.

“’What Would Noctis Do?’” Prompto smiles a sad grin. It’s an earnest attempt at his regular attitude. It fails, anyway, though he pretends that the effort counts.

Gralea, the Imperial’s capital, is not where he expected to ever find himself. A stranger in stranger places. Its alien terrain scares a primordial part of him, the one that needs the same town and same bed to feel safe, because you knew what shadows to avoid, which path to take when it rains.

He dusts his hands off. “He’d want to sleep, first of all,” he decides, tilting his head in thought. “Though we already did that once since we left the Crystal. But he’d want to do it again, anyway, right?” Narrowing his eyes, he looks to Gladio.

“Camping’s always fun.”

“For once I agree,” Prompto says. “I wouldn’t mind getting away from here as soon as possible and spending the night decked out in a tent. Don’t quote me on this, Glad, when Noct comes back.”

“Sure,” Gladio replies, and smirks. There’s something grim about the humour. Niggling at the back of his mind: _what if he doesn’t come back_? It’s a play at fantasising the future where he does—Noctis entering and waving hello as if he’d never disappeared, looking the same, wielding an ancient power and complaining about lack of sleep. Because he would, even returning from being adrift in magical slumber.

“I can hotwire a car,” Ignis says. “I may be of assistance in regards to directing you, but I cannot do it myself. I am, after all, blind.”

“And I’m _not_ deaf, because I haven’t forgotten you’re blind, Ignis, since the last time you told me. It’s fine,” Gladio says, flicking his hair off his shoulder. There’s not a sign of fatigue on him, and the only sign something is wrong are his pinched eyebrows, which is a superb effort of shutting down any upset over losing Noctis. He’s compartmentalising. Prompto expects it.

“Excellent. Then let us commit grand theft auto and do away with Imperial property. Locating an Imperial hangar will do us well, most likely, or we can resort to something on the side of the road, however pedestrian that may be.”

“Isn’t that like, the _opposite_ of pedestrian? We’re taking a car. Pedestrians walk,” Prompto says.

Noctis would laugh, or maybe gently tap the back of his waist and call him a nerd. A good memory, that.

The search for a car to take is a silent journey. Prompto walks ahead, trying to assume a stride that wouldn’t leave Ignis far behind, whilst adopting the same dogged insistence Noctis walked with. He can see it so clearly in his mind’s eye, that gait. The sure swing of his arms, his focussed gaze.

 

*

 

“We are never doing that again, understand?” Ignis says, from the passenger’s seat. Prompto, grumpily, crosses his arms. He’s sitting in Noct’s old spot, which achieves the same effect as sitting on a dead body. It’s both grossly morbid and, in a way, an attempt at pretending he’s not really gone if his seat isn’t empty. He’s just not there, for a little while.

Gralea’s roads are winding, and littered with debris. The exit from the city is perilous, and were he driving now, they wouldn’t get out. Gladio is all they have left. The night stretches on, fearsomely. If he looks closely out the window, he sees the quiet teasing of the stars as they represent a stark reminder of what little light is left. They’re pinpoints trying to break through a thick black, suffocating cloth.

“You’re the one who trusted him,” Gladio replies, drifting around an upturned crate. Prompto knocks around in his seat.

“He has nimble fingers and knows how to pull a gun apart and put it back together. I was under the _assumption_ this carried over to general technical understanding of how engines might go together.”

It might be bickering. Something low and unsteady settles itself in the bottom of Prompto’s stomach, anyway. On any other day, he’d take it in stride. His seat isn’t comfortable, and the floor of the backseat is littered with magazines and newspapers, dirt from scuffed shoes and—when he looks closely—there’s a dried up fry which looks distinctly unappetising yet oddly humanising for a, as it appeared, missing Imperial citizen.

Prompto pulls his camera out, and ignores the conversation between the two in the front.

It will be his worst vice. Or it already is, in a way.

It always has been—staring at pictures of Noctis that he’s taken, over the years, had been a bad habit that only took form out of artistic analysis and nostalgic floundering. Now it’s all he’s got, the secrets of knowing Noctis for five years stored safely and securely in a device meant to keep memories and his loneliness away.

Scrolling all the way back to the start of his long camera roll, there’s his very first favourite snap: he’d started talking to Noctis, properly, just some weeks before. That day was heavy with a hangover of summer heat, and they’d lain in the sun in the park near their school. Prompto couldn’t bear to not snap Noctis’ incandescence. He was sundrenched, the darker skin of his mother’s lapping up the light of the sun, inviting the camera, taunting it.

It’s the picture he’s kept with him the longest. Back home, where home is still home, there’s a backup at his parents’ house of every single picture he’s ever taken. There’s mountains of them. He collects a picture for every happy moment and dull evening in case he ever dares, for one single minute, to forget. It’s his job to remember.

He commits to lovingly poring over his entire collection. Noctis’ face covered in ice cream; Noctis at his volunteer work; Prompto with Noctis at the winter solstice celebration at the social work centre. Flickers of memories drowning Prompto in something like grief, and something like awe. So it’s a shrine, or a tomb, to a dead king. He’s buried there too.

Prompto remembers seeing the lonely boy, and then the prince—how they were one in the same. He saw something of himself inside Noctis, before anything else, in that way a child can spell out the simple truths before he grows up and forgets. Don’t be alone. Don’t be hollow. Don’t get lost on your way home. Open up your arms.

Snow continues to fall and coats the surrounding land in a cocoon. He has no idea where they are, outside of recognition that they have left the outskirts of the city. Nothing disturbs them in their path beyond passive blockades waiting for Gladio to steer around them with ease.

“He’s letting us go,” Prompto comments, lowly. Ardyn ruled the kingdom of mindgames. This is another taunt. To address them, to send daemons or MT’s after them would be to acknowledge them as a threat as they escape.  It fills Prompto with a familiar sickness, that same gut-churning helplessness he felt strapped up and hidden and hurt.

For all they know, the Crystal won’t even dispel the daemons. Noctis might not ever come out.

“D’you think he was lying?” Prompto asks.

“He has lied before,” Ignis says, already knowing what he’s referring to. “But we do not truly know if Noct will—it is useless to speculate.”

They reach a straight stretch of road. “You know he’s going to die either way,” Gladio says.

“That’s not particularly helpful, Gladio,” Ignis, in turn, replies quickly. Gladio isn’t directly speaking to Prompto, though it’s clear he is, now, pointedly addressing Prompto’s little flame of hope. Hope can be a dangerous thing. You can’t rely on a flicker of a promise.

Prompto so very, very much hates fate. He hates that he’s handheld Noctis to his eventual death; the weight of the world may hinge on it, the gods may turn up their noses on their petty affairs, and the kings may line up with their sacrifices and fall on the same sword—Prompto has no time for it.

He’s always believed in Noctis. There’s just a semantic difference. _Noctis._ Not his king. His friend was right, in that he has never cared for birthright, not deep down. A strange duality exists in him, where he simultaneously has always longed to be equal in class and talent to Noctis, yet he’s always known—their selves reduced to who they simply were in quiet moments together—that they are equals.

He wrestles with the two, constantly.

“Then I go down with him,” Prompto says. Not _we,_ as a group-unit. He’s not speaking for them; maybe the authority isn’t there, or the emotion.

“I am sorry. I had assumed it was merely a…” Ignis trails off for a moment, after a soft exhale of breath. “Merely a dalliance.”

“A dalliance?”

“I admit I did not—I did not pay as thorough attention as I had ought to, considering my role in ensuring I guide Noct, be his support. But he was engaged, and you and your various other distractions nullified any suspicions I did once possess.”

Digesting this, Prompto looks down at his lap. “Not both ways,” he quietly responds. “Just me.”

He supposes that’s enough, for tearing all the walls down. He’s sobbed, and he’s inadvertently admitted something he’s never liked to meditate on for too long yet has simmered in the background with the cruellest of inevitabilities: it was never preordained, but because Prompto was Prompto and Noctis was Noctis, that was how it went. The choices they both made kept him revisiting that silent little secret he’d woven, the one where Noctis, sometimes, was his.

 

*

 

Hammerhead’s sinister at night. He seeks refuge in the garage with Cindy, where he pulls apart his summoned gun to clean it. It’s a methodical and relaxing movement, how all the parts fit together neatly, not a screw loose in place. Noctis’ occasional use of guns would mean sometimes they’d sit and work together on maintenance. They never breathed a word. The only sound would be the slight clang of parts on a bench or table, like it was some holy ritual.

Cindy’s going through his camera, all the archived photos he’s saved on it. Usually he’s protective over who sees them, though he’s opening up for her.

“I like this one,” she says. He looks up at her, expression neutral. She gestures down at the display. “You and Noctis on the gondola.”

“I didn’t take it,” he says, even though it’s obvious. It’s not a selfie.

“Yeah, s’pose it’s rude to say I like the one you _din’t_ take, but. You look like you’re gettin’ comfortable.” The twang of her accent rings throughout the wide room.  She finishes with a wink, which distinctly unsettles Prompto.

He half-smiles. “The gondolas were luxurious. A guy’s gotta take advantage.”

“Sure,” she replies, a twinkle in her eye.

Toying with the rag, he has an idea of what she’s getting at. How close he was in that photo—how his whole body was laid out beside Noctis leaning forward on his knees, almost touching.

Prompto isn’t even looking at the camera in that one. A fond gaze and smile is caught on Noctis, like he’s enraptured, the hulking halls of Altissia’s multi-level structures and its deep, deep water nothing.

It’s incriminating evidence, is what it is.

“Why’re you lettin’ me look?” Cindy asks, interrupting Prompto’s nigh-eidetic recall of that Altissia photo. He knows it like the shape of his hipbone because he stares at it, too much, like all the others, but maybe that one the worst.

“I don’t know,” he says, though he does.

“Yes, you damn do.”

He acquiesces, and nods. “I do, but saying it aloud sounds a little…weird.”

“You look outside the window, Prompto? Weird’s the norm now, which renders that word useless.”

Cindy’s face turns imploring. Maybe she already knows the reason, too, and is waiting just to hear it said aloud.

“I want you to remember him,” he eventually says, looking down at his lap and polishing. “I want to know I’m not slowly going mad.” A moue of frustration forms on his face. “It’s selfish.”

“Whatever gets you by,” she responds, kindly. She’s flicking through the roll again.

Prompto swallows.

“You never had a crush on me, didja?” she says, non-sequitur easing his anxiety over his admission, however much he finds this topic uncomfortable, too. Cindy talks, and Cindy likes to talk a lot; he’s the same way, except he finds himself falling into a more quiet demeanour with her that he doesn’t mind.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, any photos I’ve had taken by a man, they always get right into my cleavage. You, pal, respectfully pull away from that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a nicer photo of me grinnin’.”

“I could just be nice,” he tries.

“Oh, they’ve been ‘nice’ and they still do what they like. Naw. I think I know what was up.”

“You think?”

Cindy playfully grins, and leans back in her chair with nonchalance. “Tell me what it’s like to kiss a prince, will you?”

“He’s technically king,” Prompto squeaks. “And also possibly dead. Did I mention that? I’m showing you a tomb. He would be my undead king-boyfriend. I would be consort? Do you think he’d date me if we just kissed once? He would never kiss me. Also, he’s—”

“You thought you could _distract him_ from _noticin’_. Don’t do that in future,” she cuts over his minor outburst. “Some ladies don’t like being hit on so incessantly.”

“I was incessant?” he says. “I’m not really good with flirting. Fake flirting, at that, is very hard, too. In my defense.”

A chuckle rings throughout the room, and Prompto, finished slotting together his gun, admires his handiwork. The rigour of it steadies his hands.

A daemon’s roar follows. It’s nearby.

“I guess I should go deal with that,” he says, artfully ending the conversation of confrontational truths.

“I’ll tell you something: I have a mechanic’s eye, Prompto, and we’re trained to look.”

“Do you think engines are like people?” He stands up, noting the excellent timing of his prepared gun and the vigour that comes from having it fresh from a clean. “Because if they are, then that means I’m inevitably going to make somebody catch on fire.”

She might have a mechanic’s eye, but he’s a marksman. It doesn’t matter how much you can pull apart something and know it down to its fluid and muscle, because everything folds apart and comes together in its own way: humans and their pummelling hearts are chaotic and messy and organic, whereas guns slot together bit by bit to gradually create a killer. Or maybe the killing is in the hands.

“I’ll get gramps to come listen for that story later,” she calls after him, as he saunters out to go take down a daemon by himself, attempting to quell the anxiety that revs itself alive at the knowledge he’s on his own. The other hunters that hang around Hammerhead are already passed out from exhaustion after dealing with the previous spawn spotted west to the garage. It’s up to Prompto.

It’s hard to avoid the ache at how much he misses Noctis in the stage of combat with his preternatural sense of knowing before Prompto did that he was in danger, the way they had learnt one another in movement and battle. Prompto had never expected to know Noctis so intimately with a weapon, but it  blossomed between them, vividly and violently, the harmony amongst chaos: his gun, Noctis’ sword, their bodies.

It’s 4AM, and the sun should rise a bit before midday. If there is a skill a city-boy like him has been taught by the sky, it’s how to read it. The deep, deep dark of it tells him light won’t come for a long time.

It’s awfully lonely. He rolls and dodges with a practised finesse, a mindless routine. He feels clumsy. Some days, he wonders how much he risks, like this.

 

*

 

Weary malaise settles in. There are no new paths to forge or set objective in mind except to survive as the land turns against itself. He is waiting, and that is all he is doing, like he’s sleeping. Like he’s waiting for Noctis to come and wake him up.

“Are you sleeping well?” Ignis asks, only hearing Prompto’s footsteps into what was once the resident restaurant. It’s still an eatery, just no longer commercial. Ignis can discern him by the sound of his boots.

“I guess,” he says. He’s always sleeping. “You hungry?”

“I have already prepared something for us.”

“Thank you,” he says. It’s the fatigue in him, today, and the gradual wash that’s taken some months to set in that nothing is ever the same as it was. When he sits down to eat in the hard chair, opposite Ignis, he notices him reading.

“I can feel your stare,” says Ignis. “I am learning braille. A young blind girl, Luticia, has been teaching me. She is rather vivacious.”

“I haven’t seen any little girls around,” he responds, then stuffing his mouth with food as an excuse for his rather bland reply. There’s no grace in his movement, because eating is so much harder now he knows it really _is_ becoming more of a precious commodity.

“Gladio and I were in Lestallum, if you recall.”

“Did you see Iris?”

“Naturally.” Ignis’s elocution rings familiar in his memory. His composure has not changed, though Prompto now knows—as the days blur together—it has been some time since he has seen Ignis. Longer, for Gladio. _Is this how it goes?_ he thinks, _is it as brutal as that? Just drifting_?

“At least she got to settle in Lestallum, huh,” he says. Iris had mentioned to him how much she’d loved the city, with all the fervent enthusiasm of a fifteen year old discovering somewhere she might belong. She’s got determination in her, he knows.

The harvest under farmers of Lucis has marginally suffered, with the sun gone. Food shortages will set in, even with Lestallum working on solutions; he thinks about giving his meal to Cindy instead. He doesn’t need it.

“Eat all of your food,” Ignis says. “I have an idea of what you are thinking. Now is not the time to deprive yourself.”

Prompto says nothing, gaze frozen at the grainy pattern of the table. “How do you know?” he says, except it’s flat, no upturn at the end of the sentence to signify it as a question. The veil’s already been broken.

Appearing to carefully choose his words, Ignis rests an elbow down. “Noctis may have insinuated enough. He was concerned what would happen after he left.”

“That’s Noct for you. More concerned about me and my issues than his death.” Prompto snorts, trying for some levity. It probably fails.

“I understand it is not entirely my business, but you must keep your strength. Just because it has been some time and distance, Prom,” Ignis continues, unabashedly, “does not mean I care about you any less. It is difficult.”

Running a tongue alongside the inside of his mouth, Prompto thinks of not replying, then decides upon, “I still care about you guys too.”

Ignis has a grateful smile on his face when Prompto looks back up. “The days are awfully short, don’t you think?”

“Shorter than ever. It’s so hard getting into a rhythm. When do you even go to _bed_? I mean, I’ve got that covered, because I usually work in schedules with the other hunters around…” Prompto trails off, errantly thinking. “I hardly even know their names.”  The topic change is welcomed.

“You don’t talk to them?”

“What’s there to talk about? ‘Sun’s warm today, Contubernalis,’ or, ‘don’t you miss a proper bed, Stulte?’ or ‘ _Boy_ , do I feel the existential angst today!’”

A silence descends longer than is comfortable. “Decidedly pessimistic there. Perhaps you ought to come to Lestallum with us next time.”

Prompto, before he knows it, finishes his meal. He grips his hands into fists over his thighs, where he can feel his muscle and not less desirable parts. He tenses. Then he releases. Tries to. This is a well-worn part of him that some years later he should know how to control. And he does, because he’s standing stupidly alive with life-force pummelling through him even when he thinks, somewhere along the line, he should have died.

 “Don’t get up. Sit here, please.”

“I’m not moving,” he says, because he’s not wasting energy he shouldn’t. Should learn to feel safe with something his body needs.

They don’t say anything else, much.

 

*

 

The world is quiet. Playing as an archivist is something he has always loved. Now, he realises he has small snippets of the world before, glistening captures of the sun and the sky, blue, of smiles that don’t feel guilty in the way happiness does when everything is bleak, so he clings a little harder to that title.

Today, he gives in to the old impulse, and pulls out footage of Noctis and himself.

This one he knows, from when they were seventeen. Watching it is conjures up that old bittersweet feeling that sat in his vocal cords right where the muscles create the sound that becomes the syllables of _Noctis_.

_Noctis sits in Prompto’s small garden, out the back of the tiny abode he called home. He’s filming through the slightly open door, and then slips out. All of Noctis’ focus is upon the book perched on his bent thigh. The camera, handled shakily, catches him in an understated moment. Prompto’s hands are still learning how to be controlled._

_“Where’s this one being uploaded to?” Noctis asks, not even hesitating or looking up._

_“Insomniadaily.com.ia reporting, it’s in wake of your recent mess in the classroom 4A in the science wing. We’re just looking for a statement, Prince Noctis.” Prompto puts on the voice of a reporter dedicated to their profession. It’s overt._

_The prince smirks. “No comment.”_

_“Then perhaps you could tell us why you left your co-conspirator, Prompto Argentum, to clean up the mess?”_

_At that, Noctis looks up. “Mr. Argentum was the one who spilt the hydrochloric acid. I’ve had enough of this kind of journalism. It’s outright slander.”_

_The focus of the camera flips around, the shot of Prompto’s filling the frame. “As you can see, Prince Noctis is denying all allegations of being involved in the crime. In time, we shall learn what_ truly _happened. Back to the studio with the weather.”_

_“You are the actual lamest person I know,” is heard off-frame, said by Noctis with fondness._

_“Do you think I should major in journalism in college?”_

_The image shutters and Noctis’ stare is caught at its peak balefulness. “Absolutely not.”_

_“You could at least pretend.”_

_“And you can’t just build a journalism career off spending all your time interviewing me. It’d be biased.”_

_“I could make a whole site out of it. I could have an entire_ industry _based on just knowing you, Noct! We’d have a contract. Nobody else could interview you. It’d be stipulated. Then I’d make most of the uploads just asking what you think about the recent Insomnia Fishing Tourney results,” Prompto says, voice carrying a little scratchy into the audio picked up by the camera._

_Noctis rolls his eyes. His smile is endeared, anyway._

_“But I wouldn’t do it, because then…then none of this would be secret.”_

_“Oh, no. Don’t go all sappy on me.”_

_“I’m not going sappy, Noct! I protect your privacy! I care about you!”_

_Prompto is very good at getting oddly serious at the strangest moments. “I know you do,” Noctis says, his gravelly tone low and sincere._

The video ends.

Old feelings dredged up fill Prompto with a hum. Those self-contained moments are what he misses most. He knows they’d always grow up, and it wouldn’t always be minor science lab pracs gone wrong—he knows some people just carry those memories with them, that past is always asking them to come back with warm nostalgic arms.

He’s always been about looking to the future, to the next map, to the next stop, the next snapshot.

That future always included Noctis. Or at least, he liked to think. _He knew._ The facts stare back at him every time about that younger naiveté is painfully brought back to the forefront: Noctis mentioning how unwell and older his father became holding up the Wall in their most secret moments; the way the crown presses into your brow before you even wear it and lingers as a phantom feeling.

Maybe he could pity himself, or pity the king and his domain, the world gone black. He doesn’t. He pities the boy _meant_ to be king, the boy _foretold_ to rule. Or pity is the wrong word: he cries for him.

He takes a deep breath in, and sets the camera down. The camp stretcher bed is hell on the back, cruel and hard and precisely what he needs to remind him to get up everyday.

“You cryin’ again?” Cindy questions, as she’s twirling a spanner around like she doesn’t know six ways to Sunday in how to expertly wield it as both a tool _and_ weapon.

He laughs. “Yeah. Real waterworks over here.”

“No need for the chirpy act,” she says, in turn.

“I’m always bright and cheerful.”

Later, not far from Hammerhead, Prompto watches the sun set. He made the trek out because he had a gut feeling or precognition—where he doesn’t consciously put the facts and emotions together, as they mesh together in the background, except he follows it despite.

The light turns from its kaleidoscope of warm orange and yellow and pink, fragments into remnants, and gradually twilight descends. He walks back, kicking his feet in the dusty desert dirt, with a laziness that taunts the daemons.

That night is when the dreams start.

When he’s walking around Hammerhead, searching the murky, oil-slick sky for a sign the next day, the sun still doesn’t rise again. His whole body runs cold.

 

*

 

He’s tired, sore, and sweaty.

“You know where the first-aid is,” Cid says, as Prompto shirks past with a gash in his arm. Hammerhead, a long time ago, started being his base. It’s not a home. He’s not really sure how to quantify a place as a home.

“Yep. Left cupboard in the staffroom,” he replies, within Cid’s earshot as he scurries to find antiseptic cream and crepe bandage to wrap around his bicep. Wearing his tank tops invite these sorts of easy hits. The wild side calls for him, after all.

He holds the bandage with his mouth as ties a knot using his left hand. He became lazy with field first aid since Noctis’ potions filled the gap, though now in this uncertain future he has learnt to remember how to conduct his hands to heal again.

“You’re a lot stronger than you look.” The keen eyes of Cid’s scrutinise Prompto, unrelentingly holding his gaze.

“What, just because I’m not big and buff like Gladio I can’t pack a punch? You should see me in the field,” he answers, and flexes his left arm. “Though managing a sniper rifle needs _real guns,_ you know what I’m saying, I manage just fine with my pistols. And the occasional shotgun, when Cindy lets me borrow it.”

“I mean you run out every day and stop this place from gettin’ swallowed up by daemons, not that I di’n’t need to see that demonstration of your muscle, boy.” Cid snorts, caustic. “Siddown. The other hunters can deal with whatever’s lurking around.”

“You could open up a café,” Prompto says, sitting down with caution. The little couch sequestered away from the rest of the workshop has seen years of use. “Call it ‘Ciddown’. Sit down. Siddown but with a ‘C’, like your name. _Cid_ down. Have a cup of coffee.”

Cid stares at him. “Yeah, why don’t I? First optimistic plan I heard in a while.”

Trying to smile, Prompto doesn’t do a great job of it.

“That was my way of sayin’ thank you before. Seems like you need me to spell it out.”

“To tell you the truth,” Prompto tries to say, swallowing down residual anxiety at a _thank you_ , “I didn’t really have anywhere else to go.”

“Lestallum’s nice, I hear. Not that an old codger like me’s gonna let some daemons run me outta my business.”

“Yeah. I should probably visit.”

He stares at the ground. He does that a lot, these days.

“World’s ending, and it’s a waitin’ game, far as I hear. Do what you like,” Cid says, matter-of-fact, so smoothly that Prompto very nearly believes it. The throb of the pain in his arm is a grounding sensation.

“You know Noctis might come back. From the Crystal.”

“’Course I do. Depends when, is all. Depends how long you’re willin’ to wait.”

“What else is there to do?” Prompto says.

“I don’ think that’s it.”

A long moment hangs, one Prompto doesn’t know how to fill.

“Loyal,” Cid says. “Tough as a nut.” Then he hums. “But that’s just the surface, ain’t it.”

Desperately, he wishes people would stop trying to see through him so clearly. He feels like cling-film, easily warped and seen through. If he looks in the mirror, he’d know that look himself. It’s the expression of grieving for lost love. Yet, conversely, he knows there is still strength he finds in himself beside that yawning emotion. It is a fully-fledged commitment to loyalty and protection he will not forget.

It’s not weak to acknowledge he struggles, even so. The sun blotted out.

“I waited three years for him once,” Prompto eventually says. “This is nothing.”

Ignis is hanging around outside later, with Gladio. He visits them. Gladio insists on rewrapping Prompto’s wound, his hands methodical and careful, for however brutish and callused they appear.

“What happened to WWND?” Gladio says. He squints at the bandage and nods his head in satisfaction. It’s a soft gesture, caring.

“What do you mean?”

“That face.”

“My arm is bleeding,” Prompto says.

“No. _That face_ you always walk around with.”

“I notice it in his tone of voice, as well,” Ignis helpfully adds. His arms are crossed.

“Noctis would bottle up his emotions and ‘deal with them another time’. Doing what Noctis would do isn’t something you can keep up every day,” Prompto defends. “I would say it’s a _very_ unhealthy coping mechanism, though useful when you need to escape a foreign military’s main base of power.”

“You still slightly bottle it up,” Gladio says.

“So do you. I’m just letting mine slowly out. Like a leak.”

Gladio then crosses his arms, and it makes him and Ignis a pair, staring at Prompto standing in front of them.

After a moment, Ignis adds, “To be fair, Noctis _did_ express grief. After you were knocked off the train.”

It could be a risky topic, mentioning how not-real Prompto had felt, the way he’d been chased through the carriages as though it were his walking nightmare. _Your fault. You._ Except what Ignis is indicating is too interesting to dwell on that memory too much. “What do you mean?”

“Iggy,” Gladio tries, but Ignis doesn’t listen.

“He was disturbed,” Ignis says. “It was exceedingly clear, to me, he had reached his limit, when it was you. I do not know what that means.”

Bitterly, Prompto can only recall this, of Noctis’ reaction: nothing. He was pushed, and then he was falling. That was all.

That’s how the story goes, stripped down. He falls, and he has no idea what Noctis is even thinking. He falls, and he falls twice over.

But the second time, Noctis comes for him. The knowledge that he would had grown inside Prompto in the way he knows his buoyancy in water and how many layers of blankets he prefers in bed. It’s an instinct the body develops.

 

*

 

Reality seeps in, viscous, stripping away the layered world of the dream. Cruel. He’s shocked awake from the cold dream, racing to find Ignis, after hurriedly dressing and trying to find where his feet went. He knows Ignis will be up. Prompto works in  opposite shifts to everybody else, half out of responsibility so the others can have somebody—dare he say—responsible on shift when the others sleep, and half out of wanting to avoid people.

“Do you dream?” He doesn’t even greet Ignis _hello_. Sitting on a crate near the caravan he and Gladio stay in, he doesn’t look perturbed by Prompto’s arrival. The iridescent light drifting down from a harsh lamp above coats them in artificial light. It’s all they have, most days.

“Of course.”

“I mean, do you _dream._ Like you’re aware. And you see everything. It all feels real.”

“Lucid dreaming, you must mean,” Ignis says.

“Lucid dreaming, yeah.”

“I have never experienced it.”

Something tightens in his chest. He’d been hoping maybe somebody else was experiencing what he was. Not alone in his desperation.

“You brought it up for a reason,” Ignis says. He shuffles over, and there’s enough room for Prompto to perch on the end. As he sits, he feels his stomach curl into rolls. It doesn’t matter how small he gets.

There’s no way he can think of explaining what intrudes his sleep, some nights. He’s ignored it for an indeterminate amount of time. Time, beyond the digits measuring the 24-hr frame, has morphed into a nebulous mass. When darkness pervades and the measure of the sun has been eschewed, there is little else to stagger out day between rise and set and burning glow.

He attempts at explaining. “I dream that I’m back kept prisoner.”

“Lucidly?” Ignis says, with interest and undercurrent of concern. Both his hands are leaning on his cane, and he purses his lips. His glasses reflect indifferent light.

“I can feel the restraints. And—and Ardyn is talking. Saying the same things as he did then.” He swallows. The MagiTek sentinels and their beatings, he feels, should go unmentioned, however disturbing it is to return every night to that. Occasionally, he considers how unbearable that pain is to losing light.

“Could possibly be your brain coping with the trauma,” Ignis says, placating. “I do not know what else could possibly be contributing. Dreaming, much like all other cognitive processes, is not as well understood as we would like.”

Moving through tar best describes his nightly adventures. It is real, and slow, and thick and unforgiving; every hour asleep is an hour inside the dream, minute for minute. Every time he rests his head. He tells Ignis of this phenomena, and silence hangs, tremulously holding.

“I do not know what to say. Has this happened before?”

“No.”

“When did it begin?”

Ignis always knows how to start asking the questions. To wade through the rigmarole and get to the core _._ “The last day of sunlight,” Prompto answers, with certainty. He remembers so vividly, laying to rest with anxiety for the blanketed world, he’d expected a small respite. Then there: back in that grotty, dilapidated cell upon cell, in the straps that held him in place. It was a dream, a nightmare, a memory. Ardyn’s taunting voice rings out the room, ominous and omnipresent, “ _Prompto_. However did you get here? It certainly wasn’t me who sent you tumbling, was it? I don’t quite recall. It would be nice if you reminded me.”

He remembers that line particularly, with perfect recall of how he felt after falling off a train and the hardness of the ground and tonality of Ardyn because he’d been so thoroughly incensed and, juxtaposed to that, weakened. Noctis had pushed him.

The first time, in the real world, he’d meekly said, “I do know you brought me here.” He hadn’t had anything smart to say.

That time, in the dream world, he’d fiercely said, “You took him from me.”

Because, however it went—Prompto taken from Noct, Noct taken from Prompto—it was the same end result. They find their way back to each other. That’s how it works.

“As if you had ownership,” dream-Ardyn said.

“As if I ever needed to own him.”

It was a dream. He could let himself go freely.

 

*

 

The world splits in two, a cracked seed opening up to finally start its growth from up through the earth. The waking, and the dreaming.

 

*

 

“You can’t escape,” Ardyn says.

“Thanks, Captain Obvious. Don’t you think I’d have figured that out by now?”

Ardyn has no real effect on him now. Not after one stint already, not after knowing what the ending is.

“I’m not sure. You _aren’t_ the brains of the team, are you? I’m sorry. Was that a sore spot?”

“Off your game today. I’m disappointed.”

He wriggles against the restraints. Never quite seeming to pop them off, he’s still stuck inside them. So he breaks down his environment, in the manner he does when all his thoughts scramble into unrelenting static. He’s contained; Noctis’ location is unknowable; Ardyn’s taunts are more grating than they are hurtful. The stated facts stop him forgetting that it’s a dream, and he’s in control, because he remembers.

Things are a little sluggish, in the world where he’s half-starved and chained. To be fair, though, he’s forced himself to go without food before, and this is practically easy for him. It’s the most poisonous thought he’s had in a while.

Each day he wakes, and he sleeps, and the time in the cell follows. Passing the days—the days that are not days, nights upon nights—and floating through them like a phantom. Perhaps that’s all they are now, splinters of humanity clinging to the cloak of dark across the land. Phantoms, ghosts, creatures of the night like all the other daemons.

Humans are ever so adaptable.

He slumps into bed as a ragdoll, this time in the caravan. Ignis is out in Lestallum again, as Cindy welds and works in her garage. Sleep comes, and he opens his eyes. Gradually he realises what’s different about the room, the alien look about it as Ardyn gloats about Prompto’s MagiTek origin.

A window just small enough to not be lavish, but rather to be humane lets golden light in. Even weakened by dirty panes, it’s pure, and brilliant, and inspires something so deep in Prompto he doesn’t know where it begins. Beyond him yet also inside him, the growth of belief, that he could do more than this.

First light of the sun. It feels like he’s returned, but he didn’t know he was missing.

He has to say goodbye to it, waking and trying not to forget and pulling himself up from the sleep he could so easily return to. Darkness asks the body to sleep.

His duties as hunter and errant helper to Cindy feel mundane, as he thinks of that sliver of warmth, the kind of light that’s picture-perfect, that spells a heat in his hands.

“I dreamed of sunlight last night,” he tells Gladio, watching him patch up his own wound across his stomach.

“Did you,” Gladio says, but he’s not listening.

“It was beautiful.”

“I can hardly remember it.”

“I think you can,” Prompto insists.

“You should come to Lestallum.”

A hard laugh escapes Prompto, much too cynical. “So you’ll stay behind and stop the daemons hitting Hammerhead, will you?”

“You can go by yourself. You’re a big boy, aren’t you?” Gladio cockily smirks. “You should see the power plant. Take some photos. Iris can show you where they grow all their food now.”

What he doesn’t want to say: _my dreams are better. My dreams occur in a place where I could change it all. I could get out. I could save Noctis._

What he knows he’ll never to say Gladio: _screw your prophecy, and screw your king_.

Counting down the hours until bed, he can’t sit still. There is a radius around Hammerhead that’s clear from daemons. Cindy’s toolbox is clean.

Then, he leaps. And he sleeps. The sunlight’s gone, as he drifts into the other space of being, artificial light pervasive and replacing it and he loathes it. He wants the organic rays of the sun, the natural warmth. He forgets this body is at the end of its tether, or close to, even as pushing on is possible, even as he can feel the gash across his nose, the bruises down his wiry, muscular arms.

Ardyn laughs. It's an oddly wistful yet surprised one.

This is the cue for the door to slide open with finality. He should’ve known this part of the sequence.

The moment can be calculated to the thudding of his heart and to the reverberations of the voices clanging into the room. He knows there’s a mathematical equation for how quickly his heart starts to beat versus the thunderous footsteps of Noctis running to him. It’s _x_ and _y_ on a grid and he’s finding himself somewhere in there beside Noctis.

Just like that, he realises. Sun breaking over the horizon. Sunlight spilling through the room. Noctis gripping his shoulder.

It’s all the same.

 

*

 

“When you met Titan, did he like you very much?”

A derisive upturn of Gladio’s nose signals Prompto’s question is very much unwelcomed. He’s sharpening his sword, as Prompto hangs around with nervous energy.

“He’s a god. Don’t think he cares either way.”

That answers an unasked question far better than his graceless attempts at bringing up the six gods. The gods didn’t care. Then what did fate even mean? Weren’t they the ones in _charge?_ There’s something like confidence surging through him, liquid sunlight warming him inside out. “So then why does fate exist?”

Doubtfully squinting, Gladio stares at Prompto. “What are you getting at?”

“I just don’t get it, is all, you know. Big gods up there who don’t give a good damn about humans, y’know? Fate’s a—fate’s a mystical force, right. Sets us down a path from birth.”

“I can’t speak about fate. I’m the fists, in case you haven’t noticed. Don’t shoot the messenger, and all that.”

Meagre surprise alights his face. He remembers Gladio contending the would-be king himself. Prompto turns his head slightly to the side. “Do you _believe_ in it?”

“If you’re trying to say, ‘Do I believe Noctis is meant to be king?’ then I won’t answer you. It’s not my place. He _is_ king. You don’t question the nature of things.”

“You did, once.”

“And then,” Gladio says, gesturing to hell above and below, “this.”

When he walks away, he feels Gladio’s gaze on his back.

Seeing Noctis for the first time—in what _felt_ like the flesh, the way his blood ran so hot—has given him something like hope, or maybe the memory of hope. Even if sleep isn’t sleep anymore, and his brain never turns off, he’ll trade the feeling of rest to have Noctis back. He hasn’t quite reached the line where he puts down his arms and says it's too much. He does not know if that line exists.

The night may resume where he recalls it will, where they’re running through the facility to the Crystal, but all he looks forward to is the feeling of Noctis with him. It’s purely selfish, even if he might try to cast it in selfless light, saving the world. He’d just like to see him alive.

In the cascade of the feeling, he stops wondering why the past is dredging itself up in his mind and pulling him down, down, down.

 

*

 

“Noct, I need to talk to you for a moment.”

This routine, of patting Noct and asking for his attention, he slips into so easily.

“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re clinched on time,” Gladio says, butting past Prompto grasping Noctis’ elbow. “We need to get to the Crystal.”

“Just let me. There’s something important.”

“Does it have something to do with the Crystal?”

“ _Yes_ ,” he snaps, firmly. He forgets this isn’t the Gladio he knows now, the Ignis, the Noctis. They haven’t seen him reveal his past, and they haven’t watched him build a shell. They all look slightly shocked, though there’s something brewing in Noctis’ expression and he can’t figure out what.

“Well, spit it out,” Gladio says, arms crossed. It’s an absurdly familiar gesture.

Prompto sighs. It’s only a dream, and he distantly wishes in this surreal reality that maybe he could borrow down and find that initiative in himself and change something.

Except that’s never how it goes, because it’s never that easy. The ground gives way beneath them as another force exerts itself over him.

 

*

 

He tumbles out of bed onto the ground, heart roaring, veins feeling like they could burst. It was shorter than usual, and he feels robbed. How he powers through the minutiae to claw his way back to the dreams where Noctis stands an inch beside him, an inch taller, miles and miles closer.

Curling into the foetal position, the tears start. All he wanted.

What did he want? He wanted a photo album of all their greatest hits, and he wanted sunshine-coated days. He wanted sheets left on the line and put on the bed that leave behind the scent of the sun. His attempt at sharing the future had sent him toppling back. He has to try harder.

Dying, surprisingly, doesn’t feel like particularly much at all.

 

*

 

Back to the start of the cycle.

He waits.

He’s always waiting.

 

*

 

There’s a car rumbling outside the garage, so Prompto goes out to see what’s making all the noise when he’s trying to sleep and take that avenue to the past. Leaning against a truck, Gladio smiles when he sees Prompto wander out in his bedclothes.

“Wondered if you’d hear me,” he greets.

“The engine’s loud. I sleep light.”

“Tch. So. I’m heading out to Lestallum.” Gladio holds a hand up, before Prompto can say, _no, I don’t want to go._ “Ignis says you haven’t been sleeping well. I wanted to see if you were all right.”

“So you ran a truck, waiting to see if you could interrupt me sleeping?”

“Basically.” He shrugs.

“I see where Noct gets his tact from.” Shaking his head, Prompto looks from the ground. Then it occurs to him, in one of those moments where all the pieces slot together, where the composition of a picture just _sits_. Those snapshots, as an artist, he lives for. “You know when Ardyn had me in prison?”

Gladio nods. A slight grimace finds its way onto his face, contorting the scar bisecting his eye.

“Well, do you know how to get _out_ of something like that? Or maybe specifically like that. You’d know how to, right?”

Nodding, Gladio cuffs Prompto around the shoulder. It’s affectionate. “Ignis also mentioned the subject of the dreams. All right. I’ll show you. Not like I need to set my trip around daylight, do I?”

Desperately, Prompto wishes he could share the glimpse of luminescence he had seen coat the room of his cell, turning the prison into something radiant.

 

*

 

The invigoration that comes from defeat, and trying again with fervent urgency, is enough to make his mouth tighten with anticipation and his stomach coil with determination. Prompto could do anything.

Noctis accepted him. But this—being in the cell—is the ultimate expression of how captive he felt inside. So the solution is to the break free, because it’s the sum: you want out, you get out. That’s what he’s learning living beside daemons in him and surrounding him and watching the sun set for the last time. He reaches out his arm, and he pulls the sun back. The myth will stay unwritten.

Ardyn’s gone silent, and Prompto begins. There’s a twist in the wrist, an insistence that’s necessary. A fervency to get out. Whilst he knows the first time around he would have furiously pushed his way out, the person he is now can. He opened up, asked Gladio for help, came back, tried again. Trying and hoping is what matters, and it’s taken him so long to learn this. Noctis is coming, even if he can’t. He’ll be caught, and he’ll land safely.

It doesn’t happen overnight, and he learns to accept this, that each night he’ll return and keep at it and pushing and pulling.

“What,” Ardyn’s voice rings, around Prompto, beneath Prompto, “do you think you _are_?”

“I dunno. Am I supposed to be able to answer that?” He laughs, running down the hallway. He has no weapon and no plans, legs kicking into the ground without care, until he remembers _his wrists._ Slender and bony, and with a leather cuff hiding a dirty secret that’s his key to what he should do first: get a gun, find the machine that’s sapping Noctis’ energy, and figure out something from there.

MagiTek robots litter the hallways, hang around the armoury. He’s riding on adrenaline and belief, nothing like fate but the one he’s furiously carved out, bit by bit, in himself.

“I’m interested in you,” Ardyn says.

“Please, just, stop. That sounds weird,” he replies, one shot to the shoulder, one shot to the head of an MT. The room stands silent after it crashes to the ground, until its bursts fill the room. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

Nothing comes, so he keeps running. Zegnautus Keep is enormous, and his memory didn’t serve to tell him how winding and unforgiving it was for people without the highest security clearance. A number which he is not counted amongst, so his path is virtually unhindered.

“I was king,” Ardyn says, as Prompto creeps down an identical hallway to the previous. The lack of discernible identity only serves to make it more unsettling.

Ardyn tells him his name, his real name.

“I suppose it is only fair we share _secrets_ ,” his wormy voice carries. “My people turned on me when I tried to help. The same your friends will do when they find out your past, I don’t doubt. You ought’nt trust them, you know.”

Ignoring that, Prompto rolls and spends time taking out three MT’s. His heart pounds with the familiar action of shooting smaller opponents, closer quarters, compared to his honed practice with goliath daemons.

“So what, that sent you mad?” Prompto says. He’s interested. _King of what_?

King of what else? Lucis.

He stops. He cannot meet Ardyn’s gaze. “So all of this...what is it really about?”

Ardyn laughs, once. “You know not the power of kings. We are _above._ ”

“Kinda literally. How old are you?” he adds.

“I am eternal.”

“That’s sad,” Prompto replies, hiding in a nook. The MT walks past. He gets out. He prefers taking them on, most of the time.

“Sad? I have seen things you would not believe. I have watched time roll by, without _care_ , and I have remained _unchanged_.”

“No, I’ve definitely dealt with that, dude.”

“I don’t follow, I’m afraid.”

“Time leaving you behind. It’s hard, you know?” Prompto snorts. “I thought I’d have _forever_ with him.”

“Nobody has forever.”

“No, I guess we don’t. Then why do you?”

 

*

 

“Cindy,” he says, “I need to go to Lestallum.”

“A break’d be good for you,” she agrees. “When was the last time you slept properly?”

“Don’t worry about me. Look after yourself. Is there anything you’d like me to bring back?”

Unexpectedly, she hugs him, and he takes an awkward moment to hug back. “You’re sweet. Maybe some sugar and flour’d do me. Any spare car parts you see, hook me up with some of them, too.”

“I’ll try.”

Later, when he hops in the truck with Ignis, Gladio nods in deference to his last vows: _protect Hammerhead._ There’s only so much one can bear to lose. Prompto nods back, solemn. He presses his lips together, and readjusts the neck of his top, straightens the fingerless slick gloves on his hands.

“Don’t crash the car,” Gladio says.

“Me, crash the car? Don’t be ridiculous. Cindy even taught me how to check the engine for simple fixes and oil changes.”

“Engines are very different to driving,” Ignis interjects.

“Cindy said engines are just like people,” he lies, mostly to make her seem like the one that would compare people to inanimate objects like guns or engines.

Unnecessarily, Gladio says, “Don’t let him near the engine.”

“I’m going to go near the engine,” Prompto replies.

At that, Gladio covers his face with both his hands. “Just…eyes on the road.”

“If you really wanna be cool, you go hands-free.”

“ _Prompto!”_

 

*

 

They finish the whole drive in one strip, not stopping, no drifting attention. Prompto is particularly proud of that. It’d taken time, but he’d learnt by necessity and bit the bullet. Nobody’s acknowledged his newfound ability yet, like doing so would honour that things have irrefutably changed, that Prompto has been a product of time charging ahead.

Stopping isn’t an option on their journey. There’s nowhere safe anymore to camp, the land eaten up for breakfast by Ardyn’s horrors. What little settlements that exist don’t have room for two more.

“I cannot believe you did that,” Ignis says, as they pull up in the drenched light of Lestallum. “I would say I cannot believe my own eyes; alas, you can evidently tell why that is not apt. But I know we are here, by the car rolling to a stop.” For a moment he pauses, and Prompto considers his profile; searching, face pointed towards massive, erected standing lights.

Prompto swallows, taking in the man-made day, the artifice.

“I detect,” Ignis says, “light.”

Isn’t that just something. “Yep. The whole town’s…covered in light,” he says, with wonder. “Everything is so _bright_. There’s so many lights, Ignis. You can see it?”

Ignis answers in the affirmative. White light, everywhere. There’s no room for shadows to hide.

Iris explains to him, later, exactly why. “What do you think _repels_ them? I mean, we have some scientists that suggest it’s just UV light, so we’ve got that around the perimeter constantly, but we don’t really know. It’s so hard to study. So the whole town’s drenched!”

“It’s effective?”

“Only if you have a big enough generator. That’s if you’re us, and that’s why. Then you’ve got daemon hunters like you and I. We deal with the rest, don’t we?”

 _Look at that_ , he thinks. Despite it all, Lestallum had pushed on and found something that looks like protection, or a solution. That gives him vigour. Iris has grown up, too, dressed in the overalls and thick polo shirt of a labourer, her hair still short in a bob. The last time he saw her was Cape Caem. Now she _fights_ —he doesn’t see her, but he knows she’s been taught by Cor, aided by Gladio and Ignis. Sometimes he wishes they didn’t have to fight. He’s awed anyway. How the world keeps spinning and changing, even when it has its head turned away from the sun.

They stay in the old hotel, now a reconstructed haven for people who are virtually refugees from the Starscourge-torn cities. He came to Lestallum to save his strength, even if at the back of his mind he’s wondering if it’s right to put so much weight on this other world in his mind.

He’s alive, anyway.

When he comes to, he’s slumped against the wall, the conversation still hanging. The familiar bruises are back, though there are no marks on his face this time around. The first and second, he’d taken _far_ too many beatings, he’d hung just on the edge, at the living end.

“I have forever, because it is my privilege.”

Prompto remembers the thread of conversation. Eternity, an unknowable concept.

“Sounds like a curse,” he replies, blasé, trying to remember the layout again.

“If Noctis were looking for you,” Ardyn purrs, “do you think he would know you’ve broken out yourself?”

 _Aw, hell,_ he curses inwardly. Outwardly, he projects total confidence. “You could tell him for me. _That_ would help.”

“That would be _cheating!_ I shan’t interfere with this current drama. Keep chasing each other. It’s infinitely amusing.”

“It’s not so different for me. I’ve always been chasing him.” He pauses, and then thinks about what Ardyn just said. “You said ‘keep chasing each other’. You admit he’s coming for me.” A delightful laugh fills the room, starting in his throat, bouncing off the walls. So, soldiering on, he takes a step. Gralea really doesn’t have a taste for aesthetics, with its brutal and harsh designs. Lucis’ Crown City at least kept a sense of decorum amongst modernity.

Then he steps out onto a balcony, overlooking the main elevator. As a highlight of the symmetry between them, this time, distantly he watches Noctis fall down deep below as a daemon smashes through the platform. His chest turns concave.

“Do you feel like taking a leap, Prompto?”

“Yeah. I will.” _Next time_. “What else happened to you, after your people rejected you?”

“A curious question,” Ardyn says, and he deliberates. The pause hangs heavily. “Surely you have figured out what I was king _of_.”

“I have.”

“Then you know what power I am gifted with.”

“The Crystal,” Prompto says.

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t use it.” Prompto thinks. And he thinks.

“The Crystal accepts only those worthy. And when you go near the daemons and darkness I did, you are just the same tainted. Just the same as your enemy, to the Crystal. I harness that power to make a mockery of it, now.”

Prompto, for everything he has seen Ardyn create, felt the wash of darkness and the weakness of light and _lost Noctis_ , feels sorry for him. Redemption is impossible, but he wouldn't be himself if he didn't.

“Aren’t you worried about your king?” Ardyn suddenly asks.

There’s a lot that Prompto’s dealt with. He’s got keeping cool down to pat, now. “He’s not my king.”

“ _Gracious!_ No! Could you say that again for me?”

“I said,” Prompto says, louder, voice gaining traction, “he’s not my _king!_ ”

“Oh. You doubt his ascendancy?” The ancient king of old thinks his voice is louder, and bigger, because he’s never had anybody to talk to, never had somebody to tell him just to _stop_.

“I doubt that he’s just a king. He’s so much more!” Prompto yells, to the abyss that the imposing levels of the Gralean military capital seems to be, to the negative space where Ardyn lurks. “He’s _Noctis!”_

“Say it louder.”

Prompto never expected to get into this dialogue, this he knows. He takes a deep breath, because he thinks he has a mote of understanding for Ardyn.

Ardyn let them go. Ardyn helped them get to the Crystal, to the power that _could_ defeat the daemons, and probably him. Ardyn is skeevy, and terrible, and most of all, awfully lonely. How mad you could go, from being ostracised, rejected by your birthright, and then fermenting upon it for hundreds and hundreds of years.

“ _I LOVE HIM!_ ” he virtually screeches, _yells,_ his arms stretched out behind him _._ “I wish you knew what it was like! Because I’m not alone, with him!"

If Ardyn is talking, then he’s not listening. And, Prompto hopes, he’s listening.

 

*

 

“It’s just a dream,” he says to himself. “It doesn’t change anything.”

 _But if it could,_ that overwhelming part of himself suggests. _If it could, what would you do_?

Save Noctis. Save him, again and again, until he’s run out of tries to do it. Save the world.

“You’re not a hero,” he says, aloud, to himself. This story was never about him, had always been about the Oracle and the king and the prophecy, fate, the world hinging on it. He's a commoner who inserted himself in between the king and the crown with a wink and a smile who's now asking too many questions. There has never been a role that he would have played beside the three main pieces on the board: the girl thrown away, the boy primed for death, the villain cackling.

What are they more than just playthings of fate and cosmic intervention, if they don’t decide their own path?

Prompto lives with the feeling that he consumes too much space, that his body is too much and that _he_ , his essence, is not quite enough. But he was good enough for Noctis, and at the back of his mind this logic lives with all the other parts of him that wage war and push through rationing without a worry. He is something, not because of a prophecy, but because of intention.

He snaps his camera out.

There’s one video he took—he thinks they were eighteen—where it’s sitting on the table as the sky falls to dusk and sweet afternoon light brushes Noctis’ and Prompto’s chins, and the rest of their faces are hidden. There’s a continual theme, of catching Noctis in the best, most heavenly light, even accidentally. It’s always sent him itching for a photo.

_A small amount of his grin can be seen, white teeth stark. “If I wasn’t a prince,” Noctis asks, somewhat playfully, “would you have even talked to me?”_

_Prompto sees right through it. “Of course.”_

_“Oh? Why’s that?”_

_The top right corner of the frame shows Prompto biting his lip. “You were lonely,” he says, seriously. “Maybe I would’ve tried to be your friend sooner. It took a while to get the courage.”_

_“All the time we coulda had, Prom. What did you have to be scared of?”_

_“I dunno. You’re totally just a nerd, and I have no idea why I ever thought otherwise, bro. Watching you geek out over a fishing pond basically broke down whatever preconceptions I had about you.”_

_They both laugh, freely._

_“Your camera’s still running, by the way,” Noctis says._

_“Is it? Oh, no. The battery will be dead soon.”_

A knock on the door leaves him to end the video. Iris bounces in.

“You seem different,” she says.

“You fit in here.”

“I do,” she agrees, happily. “Even when Lucis has gone bad, you know, I knew I would. I think Cindy would like it here, if she ever left that garage of hers.”

“I think Cindy should visit,” he agrees. “Though it’s hard to tear her away from cars, y’know.”

“Then you tell her I want to meet her,” Iris says. She tilts her head. “Are you okay?”

“I’m…fine,” he lies. _I’m waiting for sleep. Because there’s another world I visit that may or may not be real. Everything is deuces._

“You didn’t meet my eye contact and you seem stiff. You’re lying. Glad taught me how to tell,” she says, with something like pride in the swing of her arms. “You’re hurting.”

Stammering and swallowing, he eventually says, not particularly eloquently, “Yes. The sun doesn’t come up anymore, and Noctis is—gone. Food is scarce, there are people fleeing their homes who have nowhere to _go_ —it’s a lot.”

“Yeah, but it hasn’t stopped you, has it,” she says, smiling, that sweet sticky one that looks painfully so much like Gladio he could almost laugh. It’s not how they physically look that the similarities are apparent but their mannerisms: sometimes he swears Gladio flicks his hair just the same way Iris does, their laughs bellowing out into a snort if they do it hard enough.

“It might hurt,” he says, “but I'm not scared of it anymore. What's the point, hey?” A weary yet sunny upturn of his lips returns to him.

Iris grins. “You have something planned,” she says. There’s something in her eyes that tells him she is, indeed, Gladio’s sister, but she’s something else too. “You have the same look Noctis used to get before you guys set out to like, hunt behemoths or whatever.”

“I look like _Noctis_?”

“You two used to make the same face at each other.”

He doesn’t know what to do with this, and she just turns around and saunters out with a bounce in her step.

“Fix this!” she says over her shoulder.

“What,” he says, aloud, though she doesn’t hear him.

The motel bed is leagues away from the bed he’s slept on for the longest time. It feels like a comfort he could never remember. Then, he sleeps.

 _Back here_ , he thinks, drifting, swirling back into the dream.

“You _know_ what’s going on here,” he yells at the ceiling, home of Ardyn’s annoying, ever-present rambling, “you won’t _admit it_. But you _do._ Last time! Last time, you pull the ground from under us. Now? You made me watch Noctis fall. What is this _about_?” No answer comes forth. Storming down the hallway, he retraces his steps briefly to find something sturdy and long enough to hold his weight. This body is less thin, and what weight he has on his body weighs on his mind.

“You—you ancient, lonely, sad man,” he says, shaking his head.

He’s half-guessed his way to trying to save the light even as broken as he feels he is. But he’s learning, even if he has stumbles along the way, doesn’t improve in all respects.

Ardyn’s dead silent, only the mechanic whirrs of MT’s littering the ground filling the gaping, yawning maze of Zegnautus Keep. “You know where I came from,” Prompto says, trying to draw him out. “You know what I _was._ I want you to look at what I’ve been able to become. Look at Noctis. He’s _strong,_ and not just by himself.”

 

*

 

“Ignis?” he asks, the next day.

“Yes?”

“Do you think the Crystal will bring Noctis back?”

The bitter, artificial light of Lestallum reflects all around them, glints off the sunglasses Ignis wears. “I do not know for certain.”

Prompto nods. It’s up to him. He fully takes responsibility. This is about Noctis, the world, _and him_. Cindy and Cid and Iris and Gladio and Ignis and—the list goes on. He doesn’t know all the people who live under the veil, as he imagines this must be what it is like to be a king. Solemnly, he watches Ignis converse with other inhabitants of Lestallum. The city cast in light, when the rest is dark.

Noctis is not their last hope. Last hope means running out of options, and that there is one dependable thing left to keep everybody holding on. But if there’s something Prompto knows now, after witnessing the community in Lestallum and standing on the sidelines of daemon hunters fresh and old—there is hope. It may not come in the power of magic. People can adapt despite the circumstances.

He vows to prevent it. Everybody should know the warmth of the sun that curls around the body as an embrace. He is a product of that dream. Noctis does not bear the weight alone.

The next time he wakes up, it’s standing before the precipice of Noctis’ landing.

He gasps, with new life in his dry lungs.

There are three lives inside him and one aborted dream-cycle, crystallised potential and futures within his steady grasp. He is a seer, not due to a path revealing itself to him but because he has lived out each and discovered the consequences, the punishments, the living and the suffering.

Images and whirring glimpses: Noctis, on the steps before the deathly throne room, followed by an empty sunrise that came far, far too late. Another picture, memory, dream, where he had inversely foretold another reality. Ten years of waiting.

He could go mad, from this clutter. It’s possible.

So he breathes. He will not and cannot lose himself. He runs his hands down his arms and his legs, checks the barcode for a reminder, bends his fingers and watches the leather gloves move as skin with his gunner’s grip.

The natural demand of the body, to sleep and to rest, had put another chance on his plate and he doesn’t know if he should blame Noctis, but he’s blaming _somebody_. It could be Ardyn, which is a terrifying possibility that makes his changed self weep a little bit.

The dreams had not been dreams. This he knows, as it all scrambles together into a terrible, delineated picture that fills him with heady intention. Now that he’s here after experiencing unreality and having his face taken and has watched the world say goodnight, he knows that his trembling hands and fluttering fingers are ready to cup the sun and pull it back. There is nothing to fear, even when he doesn’t know who he is or where he’s really standing or if the world stops turning when he looks away. There’s just that insistent _thrum_.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU FOR READING. it means the world to me that you have joined me in this minature world i have tried to create. it is our little secret.


	2. THE SUN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this plot is less confusing than final fantasy xiii-2.
> 
> my beta, serena, has not seen the changes i made to this chapter. there were some issues i had with it that i ended up feeling uncomfortable posting in terms of flow and meaning, & so again, those errors are mine. 
> 
> i love this story, even if i'm not always confident about how i can write. i hope you like it. please let me know if you do; the reception is, really, what i live for. being able to share things is so lovely.
> 
> SONG RECS if you want and you're that kind of person (like me. be like me)!  
> rudi arapahoe - double bind  
> starkey - and then god built the cosmos  
> moon ate the dark - messy hearts  
> basically anything purity ring has made. yep. all of it.

### PART II

 

 

A train pulls up. Its wheels grind along tracks, screeching and echoing. Noctis has to blink a couple of times to register the sound and realise what’s beneath his sore feet: solid ground cushioning the weight of his body.

He can feel his bright pulse as he runs his index and middle fingers over his left wrist. It’s steady and earthly. The afterlife is strange. It could be penance, to find rest is not truly rest, maybe hell, but he knows that’s how it is for the Kings of Lucis. Their souls are transient, waiting for summoning, receding back into the palimpsest of ancient power.

Beyond the railway tracks and seemingly sombre, desolate station etched out in terracotta is a great meadow of blooming sylleblossom, Luna’s trademark, and asphodel. The latter does not grow in Tenebrae.

The rich blue is dark, at its height of the season, the white asphodel misty.

He had expected a throne to hold the remnants of his existence—to become the next king in the underworld, to accept his exile resignedly. Lingering is the curse of his blood, the way of kings.

Memories associated with the train are shadow and quiet and loss; Prompto hurtling off the edge before he even knew it. If he concentrates even a moment he can recall the force of his push and the heavy feeling of that hanging behind in his hands as he realised what, precisely, he had just done.

The automatic door on the carriage closest to him slides open. There are two choices he has: he could move his lead legs and step forth, or stay where he woke up. It’s a curiosity, to not know where each option will take him, but the ultimate decision not mattering. He’d flip a coin, if he had one. He shrugs to himself.

Not a single passenger can be seen in the carriage he enters. Surely, being ferried to death would be a more numbered activity, as morbidly he knows more people must have died than this. The seats are soft, anyway. Nothing like the hardness of a throne, pressing into his back, digging into his hips, bending his elbows at such a straight angle it almost hurt his shoulders.

It’s a comfortable respite, so he does what he does best: he sleeps. He left the weight of duty with all his other luggage outside. There might be check-in, but he doesn’t bother. He doesn’t need any of it.

 

*

 

Rolling to a stop, he’s jerked awake. The motion carries him slightly forward in his seat as he stands up to glimpse outside the opposite window of where he is. He’s experiencing vertigo by the time he’s fully aware.

More meadows and layers of vibrant nature suck up the sunlight under a ceiling of vibrant sky, a weak wash on the horizon growing into a darker shade high above he can see, just pushing his face up against the window frame.

He stares at his hands. They belong to the body he had before the Crystal sleep which sapped away ten years and gave him suicidal power. The signifiers of time he had lost in stasis are gone. As he feels the exposed skin on his jaw, he can only think it a dream.

A deep sigh escapes him. He thought he had finally accepted his duty and learnt how to shine with the gleaming crown and bear it with crushing purpose. But, he supposes, even those primed for a premature death must have trouble dealing with an even earlier end, if they’ve enough time to meditate upon it, after.

Wherever his next stop is, he doesn’t know, as a part of him is somewhere else, already, ten years into the past.

The privilege and curse of having the time to contemplate the decisions he made when he was mortal is not one he can fathom — it’s neither something he can change nor ever have the time to rectify. He wonders if this is how it’s for all the kings of Lucis; if they all, including Ardyn, drift like this endlessly until they go just as mad as the ancestor he had met in the flesh.

Picking up in speed again, Noctis assumes his precious spot as he feels his feet unsteadily lose balance when the train begins to whirr. Gradually, he watches the landscape shift. The grass turns an all-too familiar colour, one that wraps around him when he warps and pulls his weapons out thoughtlessly, and then the whole picture recedes to a violent supernova as it transforms to a city.

That city is of black and bones and skyscrapers surrounded by a desolate landscape, the one and only Insomnia. The image changes in the same terrible, great manner. Hammerhead. Duscae. Cape Caem. Altissia rising in the distance out of water like a long-lost, forgotten empire of myth beneath the ocean. The land of Eos, snapping by wildly, as if in a set of Prompto’s photographs.

He can slumber no longer, the brief break he had taken interrupted by the imposing figure of the Imperial capital, Gralea. The murkiness of Zegnautus Keep with its insidious shadows and darkness dredges up remnants of memory where Noctis had yelled his throat raw to find Prompto, had been subsumed by the Crystal, had lost all his chances. The way of kings is grasping and holding tightly onto moments of greatness and never knowing what it is to keep something, just for a little while.

He does not know if it’s because he steps up that the train stops, if it’s causation versus correlation. It doesn’t matter.

If it’s a solitary chance, to enter into his past and spend just a moment there longer—then so be it. It’s one more time that his throat had been too hoarse to ask for.

 

*

 

He slips into the past, like sliding into bed. His transportation vanishes itself into the same blue cloak.

Standing right on the edge of where he lost his magic as one would a limb, he realises he has _actually_ gone back. It’s a blocked sinus, trying to reach out for that warmth and magic in his skin that isn’t there. But he accepts this path that has opened itself, where maybe he could live out his goodbyes just once more. Reach Prompto sooner.  It’s an obvious objective, where he doesn’t even need to go through a process of problem-solving— _what do I do now_?—that Ignis would encourage. It’s obvious. There is no question that is required to be asked, there is simply knowledge that surfaces to make itself known.

He doesn’t question it because it’s just what he does. He’ll come if it’s the second time, the third, the fourth, or maybe—if this is his eternity—forever.

Of course, he has nothing to use to _get_ there, bar for the ring which conveniently saps his soul.

“I can’t use the ring,” he says aloud, to fill the ghostly silence. “ _I can’t use the ring_.”

So he has to evade goblins, daemons, twist and turn and block without warping. It’s easier when he knows the steps and what to expect; each spawn and trap lain by Ardyn fixes itself in his memory. Sweat runs down his back accompanied by determined anxiety, even if he’s done this before. The threat of being _alone_ , of knowing he’s _alone,_ is more than he can take because it is, now, so desperately overfamiliar. The rest of his friends are not with him, and he knows how empty that throne feels.

There is one thing he had briefly forgotten: Ardyn’s annoying running commentary. “Awfully determined! I congratulate you,” he says.

Noctis rolls his eyes. “Of course I am,” Noctis says, nonchalantly. He’s always been silently determined, where it came to Prompto, even if he never actually said anything to that effect to the man himself.

He really has no time for putting up with Ardyn, which is saying something, because he thinks he has what could quite possibly be forever on his hands. He needs to find Prompto, and after that the plan dissolves, mostly because he doesn’t quite understand what, precisely, this limbo is for, only an inclination.

An MT takes him off-guard, when it falls to ground with a sickening thud all on its own and doesn’t combust in red heat. A slightly terrible thought occurs to him. He steps forward warily, cautious of his right boot as he bends down to rip an arm off the MT’s corpse.

After all, he needs something to defend himself with. He can’t just wait around all day for the playthings of Ardyn’s to explode, though he manages to sneak past most of them. The goblins are the trouble.

He’s really making use of his environment.

It’s not until his eyelids become lazy and he pants with exhaustion that he puts the clues together and recognises he feels sleepy. On a good day, like say, when he was alive, he could feel sleep around the corner before it even hit him.

Noctis doesn’t even want to rest.

“You seem a little _lost_. It is a rather confusing layout for an invader, I’ll give you that,” Ardyn says, interrupting Noctis spending a minute to listen to his body.

He listens to his body, and finds the nearest safe room with the totalitarian bunk beds. Anything to get away from the unnecessary remarks.

Noctis doesn’t actually want to sleep, for once in his life. He could take his time, could meander his way to Prompto’s cell—he won’t, and that’s because the last time he saw Prompto was bidding him goodbye on the steps to the throne room, when he walked with his eyes open into his own fated death.

So he wants to find him, as hale and whole as he could be given the circumstances. He could call it taking ownership of the things he can do, without being guided by the unkind hand of fate and the Crystal, yet the swelling forethought is that he just wants to see him. Just see him, for even a moment of forever inside waking death. Prompto had been by his side in life with the flash of a camera and snark to make his day, his everyday reminder he wasn’t alone and he had somebody—one of the people he let in—close to him, even when the words couldn’t come to tell him.

He’s a sucker. He told himself he had said goodbye and he’s a liar.

The engagement, the Crown City falling, his imminent sacrifice; it’s all so much, and had never been fair. He knows there are children born into poverty and conditions they never wanted and he’s not like them—had never wanted for food or clothing, and if he had one power as king it would be to change that for them—but he can’t help but wish he didn’t die. Not so early, not before he could _do_ something, not when he wasn’t even so heartily sure about being king.

He gives in and sleeps.

 

*

 

“Hey, Ardyn,” Noctis says, curling down the maze-like, winding corridors. “Why are there safe places you let me sleep?”

It’s interesting, talking to Ardyn, when he had seen him dead. There’s a certain vindictive thrill to it.

“It’s only fair,” Ardyn replies. “After all, I never sleep. We ought to play by the same _rules_.”

“You never _sleep_?” Noctis can’t help the exclaimed question. To not sleep would be cruel. It’s the natural cycle and demand of the body.

“An exaggeration, boy.”

The more he thinks about it, the more the facility is a burial site than a military establishment. It’s full of mangled, unnamed corpses, patient-zeroes spread around like litter. It’s wholly unnerving to walk through the emptiness and know how many people the MagiTeks had been. How Prompto was almost one. How close they had been to not ever meeting, bar for on the battlefield where without a thought he would have struck him down.

It hurts, even just the thought of it. He aches.

He soldiers on anyway, because after being dropped off by the ferry of death between worlds, he has this path he’s wants and is forcing himself down. It’s strange, the things he admits to himself after his death. He hopes dying isn’t a necessary requirement for proper emotional growth.

Ardyn calls Prompto Noctis’ heart’s desire for the second time, and he didn’t contend it the first. Doesn’t do so the second.

 

*

 

“I’m sorry,” he says, slumped in the middle of the moving electrical prison, “I’m coming.” His voice is wrecked out of his chest.

Ignis and Gladio save him, just like last time. Maybe he’s doomed to repeat this all, again and again.

Except—this he knows, after sleeping in the Crystal and finding the planet had turned its back on the sun—the rigmarole might be worth it, as he runs to the door that he knows will open to the room that will set it all straight in his chest.

Like if he took a scoop, and he’d removed all his innards, that’s where Prompto went. When he touched his arm or he slipped a hand around his waist at night in the tent or he just grinned, molten silver and wonderful.

Because there he is, strapped up and imprisoned, and he’s bleeding and bruised and thin—and he’s the most precious thing Noctis has ever had, ever lost. There’s just a spot inside him waiting for Prompto to come back in and make warm again, like he just needs to knock on the door and Noctis will embrace him home.

It’s been like that before he’s ever known. He’s a little slow on the uptake, with what he feels—it’s easier to pretend and easier to forget.

He can’t forget this. He can’t say goodbye.

“I’ve got you,” he says.

 

*

 

Striding ahead, full of uncertainty—what does he do now he has Prompto?—he hears the man himself say something.

“Noct, I need to talk to you for a moment.”

And he turns so quickly, because he doesn’t remember this.

 “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re clinched on time,” Gladio cuts in, jostling Noctis. He doesn’t notice. Prompto’s hand is tight around his elbow, his touch welcome. “We need to get to the Crystal.”

“Just let me. There’s something important.”

There’s nothing to suspect why Prompto would have something to say about the Crystal, because this is supposed to be Noctis’ trip in revisiting the harrowing time he had with them. Picking a different escapade of theirs might have been an option, except he’s not sure. He’s wholly uncertain about what he’s doing, right now. So it’s a proper goodbye before he goes into the Crystal, maybe, if it changes anything. If it doesn’t—then it’s his selfish last moments in his mortal coil.

This is how the story goes: Noctis dies twice.

 

*

 

“You were only supposed to die once,” Lunafreya says.

“ _Luna_?”

She smiles, and the act is so unfamiliar it cuts Noctis. “Hello.”

He’s speechless. The empty train, the one he had thought he owned by himself, is not so empty. His perspective has been shifted and turned and he’s left with a spinning head, after the straight path of acceptance and clarity, reluctance and grief.

 _That was his path_. He was engaged and dead before he knew it.

“You shouldn’t act so surprised,” she intones, her voice so new in comparison to the written word and his memory of when they were young, “this is, after all, of your own making, Noctis.”

“I—what? I didn’t do this. How are we even here?” He shakes his head, surveying the carriage he’s back in again. It might be the one he was in before, might not be, as it’s virtually indiscernible.

“Must I explain everything for you? Your fate, your magic, your kingdom—” She stops abruptly. For a brief moment, it sounds like she’s actually annoyed. Then she smiles, eyes fey. The hair around her shoulders is unlike how he last saw her, standing in a crowd. It’s flowing and free. She continues, “We are here because of what I would term as unforeseen circumstances.”

“Well,” he says, fingering his glove, “I don’t have any clue what those could be.”

“You did not find the rest you are owed,” she says, and doesn’t elaborate.

“Did you?” he asks, on reflex.

“Yes. I am satisfied with the decisions I made. As Oracle, I have stared down gods, and I am soaked in ichor, Noctis. I saw the Starscourge and was the only tool to prevent it before you found the Crystal. It is a matter of fact and reality.”

He looks at her, really tries to look. He sees a person he admired and wanted to emulate as a boy; her calm reasoning and logic, the utter confidence in her path. It was such a stark contrast to him, with his lack of surety, hesitance to wear the crown.

When he does not reply, she tilts her head, and says, “You possess the power of kings, as I am the Oracle. You know how the previous rulers of Lucis can inhabit the corporeal realm after their passing.”

“They don’t find rest,” he says, because he knows. That is why those ghosts linger.

“In a sense,” she says. “There is always a part of them tied to Eos. It is enough to be a catalyst, to draw you from your true sleep. I sensed the disruption.”

“Disruption.”

“You could not be ferried to your death. I had been waiting, and you did not show your face.”

They’ve talked more in their time in what he recognises as limbo, now, at this age more than they ever did before. It’s the same scenario for them: discussing destiny, and all its infuriating hows and whys. He wishes she didn’t wait for him; she deserves her rest. But it’s not his place to say.

“Always the Oracle’s duty to help the King, isn’t it.” He smiles down at his lap, and thinks distantly of Prompto. Where he is. What he’s doing. His sombre frown when confronted with a compliment, when he least expects it.

“Even in death.”

“Then aren’t we privileged, to fulfil our duty,” he mutters.

“I do not believe you are. And that is why I am intervening to help guide you, before you drift, eternally. Before you keep bringing Ardyn back.”

His head snaps up at that to stare at her. He considers. “Are you saying Ardyn isn’t _dead_?”

“Your spirit is returning to before he was slain.”

“This is confusing,” he mutters, “I thought he was dead. I killed him.”

“You are the last king remaining with a soul that refuses to rest. You reject your fate—and the power drawing you back is not yet destroyed, and neither is he.”

A roaring gush of denial and confusion sets his lungs to flap quickly. “I fought until the end, okay?” he says, feeling his voice crack, grips his knees. “ _That_ was what was wanted of me. _So I did it._ ”

“There is something I never asked you,” calmly she says in response, so much more composed than Noctis ever could’ve been, even as a ruler, even sitting on his throne with jewels down his wrists.

“What’s that? My hand in marriage, yourself?”

“There is no need to be so snappish.”

“I’m _dead_.”

“A point I shall concede. Though I should note, so am I, Noctis.”

“Sorry,” he says, immediately reticent, not meeting her gaze.

“I never asked what you wanted,” she says, stampeding forth without letting Noctis wallow in his quick guilt.

“I guess nobody did.”

“That’s not true,” she says. “I want you to focus on Prompto.”

“I—” he starts and stops, confused. “Why Prompto?”

“Why Prompto,” she muses.

“If he’d met you, he’d have really liked you,” Noctis says, for wont of something better to say, though he knows it’s a true statement nonetheless. “Maybe even married you.”

Unexpectedly, she laughs, a short blunt one. “Maybe a more willing husband than you.”

“Maybe,” he says, with a friendly nod. He cranes his neck to look out the window in a reminiscent fashion of when he had first found himself in the train.

There, that striking blue engulfs the field again and it’s an incomprehensible vision of a sun being born, a sun dying, a sun coming back to life. Then it’s Hammerhead right outside his window.

“Hammerhead?” he asks, as if Hammerhead could answer back.

Looking comfortable in her seat for a dead person, Lunafreya cups her hands together, watching the blue light stutter and fade. “I’ll be waiting here.”

“Yeah. No rush.”

He steps off, noting the difference in the place to his younger memory—more people loitering around, who appear to be daemon hunters holding onto their weapons with vice grips. So he gets back immediately onto the train.

“ _Luna_ ,” he hisses, “what if they _see me_.”

“Do you want to be seen?”

“No?”

“Then,” she says, gesturing to the door, “go.”

“Where?”

“I have conversed with the gods. They find this amusing. Whilst it’s still funny, could you please just hurry up, walk into Cindy’s mechanic shop, and then come back?”

“What do you mean the gods think it’s _funny_ —Luna, I’m just…confused. And tired. And dead.”

“Well,” she says, “they don’t particularly have a concept of humour, or really anything one would consider human. They think the loop you have pulled yourself into is amusing, because it toes the line between death and life so much more boldly than your predecessors. To my understanding, they thought the same of Ardyn.”

“I’m not the same as Ardyn,” he hastily replies. It’s a clever method, to get rid of him by grouping him with Ardyn, however cruel it is.

So he walks out, not wanting to be seen but brimming with curiosity and fear. It’s an equal contention of his gut, nerves having difficulty deciding between the two.

Luna knew Cindy by name because he had sent letters to her about the mechanic, and said mechanic is on a jack beneath the car she’s working on which he recognises as the one Talcott drove. Inspecting the space, he can’t see anything out of the ordinary, until his gaze shifts to the back.

There’s a shivering body on a camp cot, a raggedy oversized t-shirt an unusual sight because Prompto so often wore tanks that it’s downright peculiar to see. His legs jut out from a pair of shorts that he’s never seen Prompto wear, either, and his usually so carefully styled hair is cutely mussed in his sleep.

But his expression is one of pain, and Noctis wants to reach out. He takes insistent steps up to the sleeping form of his best friend and puts a hand out, hoping—for just a moment—to still his body and feel a sliver of his warmth. His back is bony, more so than ever, the line of his spine too defined for his own liking.

“No,” he whispers, with worry. Outside, it was dark, and he fears that he knows _when_ this is. This is when he’s gone. Before, or after his intervention into the muddied time-stream, he doesn’t know—it doesn’t matter.

He wants to change this. With caution, he brushes his gloved hand against the hair kissing the back of Prompto’s neck, and retraces his steps backwards out into the unforgiving night, back onto the ethereal train.

“Lunafreya,” he says, back aboard, rejoining limbo, “do you know what’s happening?”

“I’ll save you the time,” she says, “as one last thing I do for you and this world. He’s in the loop, too.”

His stomach falls beneath him and he feels sick. “He’s—stuck?”

“Living out every day in his dreams.”

“So both him _and_ Ardyn—Luna. _Luna._ What have I _done_?” Sinking into his seat he can only think: _what have you done_ on repeat, a rumbling cacophony to accompany roaring regret and shame.

He swallows down all the feelings, straightens his shoulders, as Luna’s unwavering gaze doesn’t leave him. With a deep exhale, he looks back up at her.

“What do I do, if not follow what I was fated for, Luna? The people we are—were we ever gonna be normal?”

“Never,” she says, with solemnity. Luna seems sorry for him. “Accept that, at least.  Fate can be swayed. It was in your blood to command the power of kings, and some may call that fate, some may call it chance. I believed and still believe devoutly that you have the power to end this. I leave the choice up to you.”

“What If I did _nothing_ ,” he says, “what if I dropped the Ring of Lucii, left the throne empty, said I didn’t want the power? What if Ardyn had nothing left to fight? I destroy the Crystal my magic is linked to. I undo everything I can—I _live_. What would the gods say to _that_?”

Then a thought occurs to him. His quip becomes something else and transmutates.

“So why don’t you try? I feel fate and purpose singing in my skin, the way magic is in yours,” she says, stepping out of her seat, elegantly cold and efficient in her movement, “we walk our paths, Noctis. Perhaps it took death for me to realise yours was different. Just make sure the Starscourge remains banished.”

Luna steps out of her seat, and places a hand upon Noctis’ shoulder for a brief moment. She says nothing. He watches her walk away, not moving from his own seat, knowing full well he doesn’t have to say anything, either. They said goodbye once, and he accepts _that_. He accepts her choice.

He has his.

If he uses the power he was born with for one last thing, he would destroy it. Free himself, free the lingering souls of kings past, free the world that slept under darkness for ten years and had itself ravaged.

 

*

 

Everything recomposes itself, shifts the slightest and the world pivots its axis and Noctis thinks he knows what he has to do, has let his light through. This path he does not walk alone, has never walked alone, and he deeply knows now that to die, to even be king, never had to be his fate. Ardyn is an example of something he never wants to become, and he’d watched his own father all his life have the years he deserved taken from him.

The gods laugh. The power may be his to use, but he does not need it. Once more the window view collapses in a blue haze, losing its lustre for its repetition, and he stands in the bowel of Zegnautus Keep.

So, the second time didn’t work out, but maybe his third try is the charm. One foot in front of the other, black boots not making a sound as he crosses from his seat to the automatic door, he presses the button. The door opens. He steps out.

At this parting from Lunafreya, he doesn’t look back. Goodbyes are always hard, but not if they both have somewhere else they need to be. He wishes he could have done more for the Oracle, but he knows she embraced her role _._ As she said. He understands their differences.

And isn’t that the greatest thing, to choose your own victories and losses.

Just like that: the night opens up. His eyes adjust, and he _looks_ , he can see the pinpoints of light amongst the dark blue, so he starts to move because his story starts again and it will always start the same: find Prompto.

Prompto _knew_ him, all of his sullenness and how he could go quiet, maybe fish for too long and not eat his vegetables, and he was there for him, anyway, king or not, prince or not. He had video evidence of Prompto admitting it wasn't just about him being a prince he'd befriended him. He made sure to get that. To remind him. He’d so subtly said _you left your camera on_ like Prompto ever gave that much inattention to his camera, for how hyper focussed he always so vigilantly was on his dear hobby.

Those memories. The untouched ones that live in the _before the engagement_ time, _they_ are his; the small snippets between the kingdom tumbling down, that, too, are his.

He never wanted Lucis or its throne, didn’t want to marry Luna—his _sister,_ his penpal, somebody meant to lead and heal and _do_ things. The first two were secondary to the last. It’s cruel, that he has this, when she doesn’t—but that’s how it is. So he’ll use this opportunity his stubborn spirit has taken, and he’ll go swinging out saving the world from the Starscourge for her and her god-touched hands, and all the people that spent ten years in the dark.

Prompto wasn’t fated, but he was wanted, anyway.

“That’s what you were trying to prove, wasn’t it,” he says, entering the same hallways that exist in his mind beside terror.

“Prove what?” Ardyn answers, as if he’s been waiting for Noctis to talk.

Sidling against the corner, he checks the next section and runs for it.

“Taking Prompto.”

“That explains very little.”

“Because you know what I’m fated for and what I’m not,” he explains. “And he’s not.”

Ardyn laughs, not a sneering one but something that borders delightful. “Yes. Yes, perhaps you are right, Noct. I’m almost impressed you figured me out so effortlessly. Even more surprised how open you are about sharing such an intimate sentiment. Character growth?”

“Let’s just say I don’t see any reason to keep it all in right now.”

“That must be new for you.”

He knows what dance he needs to do to get to where Prompto’s being held.

“How many times are you going to do this, my fair prince? Floundering down this corridor? It’s almost sad to watch,” Ardyn presses. His echoing voice has never failed to disturb Noctis.

“As many times as it takes to find Prompto.” What he doesn’t voice: he’s found Prompto twice, and even if he knows where he is, knows which door to take and how to slip through attacks without magic, he will do it again. And again. He doesn’t know how to stop. It’s just not an option in him. (Isn’t that the maddest thought: the _ability_ to just stop).

There are some fights he can’t run from, which is how he ends up spending so, so long fighting off MT’s and trying to get them to kamikaze themselves. The hardest decision is not to reach for the ring. The goblin-daemons take the longest. But the fights don’t matter; he uses whatever he can in his environment, throwing Imperial chairs, making battering rams out of the legs. It takes _hours_. He remembers none of it.

So when he finds a safe room, slips into sleep, he rests with a weariness that feels new. The room is vacant, no sound of Gladio twisting and turning in his sleep, or Ignis’ very slight, white noise snore. What he misses most, though, is how he used to sleep so close to Prompto in a tent or sharing a double bed that he could feel his breath on his shoulder and pretend for one shuddering minute that it was more than the air they shared.

The truth is right there, knocking on his door, and he’s looking at it right in the eye now that it’s not layered behind facades of duty and terror and fate.

Thrusting himself forward into Zegnautus Keep and working through its now-familiar secret hallways and vacancy is easy. It takes days or weeks or months—it doesn’t matter.

 

*

 

The ground collapsing beneath his feet, for the third time now, doesn’t catch him by surprise, and his stomach twists knowing what’s coming. As gravity exerts its rule over him, the only thing he can think is: Prompto. He grasps onto the idea of him.It's hard, the air whipping by, but something coils around him and pulls and pulls and pulls on _something_ he can't place

The landing is never easy, and neither is the fogginess and loss of time as he pulls himself up from a severe crash. Sounds and light bounce off the walls around him. He's hardly conscious, and he doesn't know how long he lies there, waiting, thinking, dreaming, know he had been pulled back into the past and he was alive, whilst he was at it. Alive. Free.

His boots are scuffed, clothes torn and muscles stretching thin, dirt down his arms and scrapes and what he _thinks_ could be dried blood. The oxidisation process renders it somewhat ambiguous.

But he gets up. He can _choose_ to get up. The stronghold’s enormous layout settles a bone-deep fatigue in him except he just has to push a little further, summon up the focus. He needs a moment.

It’s so _much_.

Here’s the thing: he’s blazing bright, and he _knows_ it, and he _has to find Prompto_.

Then he finds Prompto.

One moment he’s thinking it, the next he’s there, as if in a dream, or a hallucination, conjured up from well-worn fantasies and echoing feeling.

Prompto drops and slots, careening, into his orbit.

“Hey, babe!” an incredibly familiar, fond voice calls out as his frenetic figure enters into Noctis’ vision. Prompto’s dangling, slightly swaying back and forth, from a reinforced, industrial rope meant for Imperial use. “Just _swinging by_.”

“You,” he starts, shaking his head, lightly chuckling at how focussed he had been at trying to find Prompto he hadn’t even considered Prompto might have saved himself already. “You have got to be kidding me,” he finishes, with the greatest fondness in his tone, because he has seen _fantastic_ things in the past uncountable hours he has been alive since his death. _But this_. He does not know how to quantify it.

His face so _gleaming,_ the freckles dotting his face painted over pink skin bright with exhaustion. “So I had this plan, and it kinda worked out, I think,” Prompto says.

“You’re here.” It’s unbelievable. Noctis takes one step, with caution. At the back of his mind, he supposes it could be Ardyn’s trickery again, how he had fallen for that already in his desperation. Except looking at the proud grin, the disbelief yet warmth in his light blue eyes, the hips peeking through between his top and jeans—it’s Prompto. It’s the _real_ Prompto. Nothing can emulate that smile, that cadence, that pattern of speech.

“I am!” Prompto says, finally seeming to realise he didn’t need to hang onto the rope. He treads carefully over the dead bodies, and appears to obviously avoid looking at Ravus’ corpse. The sword goes untouched.

Noctis is, for the first time in the longest time, wholly unsure as to what to say. He has so much choice.

“What, you gonna say anything? Last you knew I was kidnapped.”

“Just—” He stops, abruptly, and takes in a deep breath with a tentative step forward. Prompto draws his eyebrows together. “Come here,” Noctis properly says, his voice rough. “ _Come here_.”

He ends the last fraction of distance between them with one hasty step and throws his arms around Prompto and holds him tightly, where before he could only place a tentative hand on his slumbering body, or say goodbye with his eyes at the steps to his impending demise.

It’s safe to take this detour, to let himself fold in around Prompto, to get a little closer. Thus he takes this, greedily. Prompto clings to him, his lean and muscular arms so much like something he will long for endlessly when they part.

“Noct?” Prompto questions, where Noctis can feel the rumble of his vocal cords.

“Been through a lot. Don’t mind me.”

“ _You’ve_ been through a lot,” Prompto says. “ _You’ve_ been through a lot!”

“Oh, please,” he says, “kidnapping? Absolutely nothing compared to the beds I had to sleep in.” _And also death. But, you know, I think you being hurt is worse,_ he doesn’t add.

“Your Highness, _I’ll_ show you a good bed.”

Noctis tucks his head a bit lower so his mouth lightly presses into Prompto’s neck, smiling into the tender skin. Like he could ever turn on this willingly.

“So…what do you have in mind we do next? Because I gotta admit I was a little focussed on one thing in particular,” Prompto says. He leans back a little, and Prompto tries a pull away. He holds him back, not wanting to quite end the moment yet. “Do you think we should get to the Crystal?”

“About that,” Noctis says slowly, and swallows, tries to think of how to phrase the following. He settles upon, “I’m going to destroy the Crystal.”

Nobody moves, for a stuttering moment. Then, cautiously, Prompto says, “Noct, how many times have you found me?”

This is no surprise for Noctis, but confronting the truth is nonetheless difficult. He had inadvertently condemned Prompto to live out the cycles he had set in motion. “This is my third,” he replies.

Their gaze holds for a moment, something silent passing between them. “I was here in my dreams, y’know,” Prompto says, “and I knew it was because of you. Well. Okay, it wasn’t until the _end_ I was like, ‘Hey, this is probably my magical best friend’s doing,’ though I did consider it being Ardyn’s…Ardyn-ness.”

“So what’s real, then?” Noctis asks. He unconsciously tightens his grip around Prompto a little more.

“You. This. Me.” Shaking his head, Prompto looks away, and then back. “I remember three versions of events. Which is really weird. It’s. Really weird. All at once I knew I’d waited for you ten years, and then I’d waited again and didn’t realise it. After the sun set the last time—I dreamt I was here.”

“That’s my fault,” Noctis confirms. Moving back, he releases Prompto, and he watches that firm, determined line of Prompto’s mouth form as his fists clench at his side.

“Yeah, ‘cause if I really had a problem with seeing you again, I wouldn’t be here right now,” Prompto says, insistent, reaching out and grabbing Noctis by the wrist. “You are _so_ pigheaded sometimes. I’m thankful, honestly.”

“ _Thankful_?”

Prompto crosses his arms, and says, “We thought you were _going to die._ Or were dead. You were _gone_. Noct, I didn’t exactly understand what was up with being back here, but I knew I had to do something. You know that feeling.”

Staring at Prompto, with his chocobo hair and contrastingly serious expression, Noctis knows. He knows that feeling.

Appearing to deliberate, Prompto chooses his words carefully and runs his tongue along the inside of his mouth. “We save each other,” he says. The sentence itself is so strikingly casual yet affects Noctis, deeply. “So how did you end up here?”

“It’s a long story.”

“And I’m always listening. You know me,” Prompto says, releasing Noctis’ wrist. He immediately wants his hand back. He wants to feel his pulse against his fingers.

“How about I start with this,” he says, putting a hand over Prompto’s neck just to graze his thumb over where the pummel of his heart can be felt, “you’re real.”

“Nice throwback. Ten out of ten.”

“Don’t ruin the moment.”

“You’re the one that somehow knew that daemon was gonna smash through the bridge and _you still_ got caught by it.”

“There’s no other way around,” Noctis defends, trying not to smile, trying so hard not to smile.

“Well, _I_ watched you get totally bodied. Considering it was the third time, it was totally weak.”

Noctis snorts. Hesitating, he tries for a subject change. “Do you remember when I said goodbye to you at the steps? Before I went into the throne room?”

He’s lacking in tact. Prompto looks down, and back up, forehead furrowed. “I do. But it’s like a distant memory. Do you know? Like the way you remember things as a kid. Most of it doesn’t feel… I mean, I feel like I came from the train, but I also lived out that time. It’s hard to explain.” He takes in a deep, deep breath, and exhales. “I do remember how it felt to say goodbye.”

His face turns melancholic. Noctis can only think of how simultaneously grateful and sad he is at how easy to read Prompto’s emotions are.

“After that I died.”

“I know,” Prompto says.

“Then I woke up.”

“Oh, this is going to be long.”

It was long, and arduous, and it’s his own selfish refusal not to die—to not leave Prompto and all the others behind—that dragged him back. A terrifying cocktail of love, selfishness, and sheer determination.

It’s a lot to summarise. He starts out with, “Well, kings of Lucis don’t actually, you know, _die_ properly,” which he decides is a little too brusque for the subject matter, but he’s no storyteller.

After a moment of incredulous laughing, interspersed with a shocked gasp at _‘You saw_ Luna?’, Prompto says, “So what you’re saying is—you were too _stubborn_  to _die_? That is _hilarious_.”

“It’s really not as funny as you think it is.”

“Yes, it is.”

Noctis came back from the dead for this.

“By the way,” Prompto says, “we have to climb back up that rope.”

“I think we can just go the way I normally go. Where did you even _get_ that rope?”

Nose upturned, Prompto replies, “Where do you think I got the gun? You could always need rope. _I got the rope for a reason_.”

“It’s appreciated,” Noctis says, slapping a hand gently across Prompto’s waist. He almost forgot how touchy they were with each other. “As much as the entrance took me off guard and slightly terrified me.”

“I slightly terrified you? I gotta write that down.”

 

*

 

“Do you think we’ll find Ignis and Gladio again?”

“I’m not sure,” Noctis replies, hiding behind Prompto as he guns down an MT before it can even see them.  “You wouldn’t happen to have one for me, too, would you?”

“Ehh,” Prompto sounds out.

“Typical.”

The base doesn’t feel so lonely to walk through, as he stays close to Prompto. Prompto has the weapon. He goes first.

“Last time I found them just before you,” Noctis says, as the current room is empty of anything to attack them. It’s one little moment of respite.

“You think there’s enough differences to change that?”

“I think so. This is much, much earlier.”

“Well. Let’s get your weapons back, then to the Crystal. Right?”

“Only plan we’ve got,” he agrees. He looks at Prompto: the beauty marks on his chin and the one hiding low on his shoulder, close to his armpit. The freckles. His silk hair.

Noctis had chosen to ignore it, once.

“Then again,” he says, as they navigate, “they did just magically find me. So maybe that’ll happen again.”

“I technically magically found you,” Prompto says. “Magic is on our side, pal. I mean, I’ve got you, right?”

“I have no magic,” dryly Noctis says.

“It’s the spirit of the statement. Besides, how else do you think all of those different things that happened to me managed to unite?”

“How do you mean?” Noctis stops, as they approach an automatic door.

“Can you really explain how else I got back here, properly, with all that...other stuff? Magic. That’s how it always is with you.” Winking, Prompto reloads his gun. “You started looping here the second time, and somewhere along there I came through whole. Though I can’t explain why."

A beat passes.

“I just wonder,” Prompto says playfully yet with a twinge of seriousness, sauntering ahead, arching his head at Noctis behind him, “what ties me to you.”

Noctis knows the answer to the question. If he gave the answer a synonym of feelings, it would perhaps be found when he is near drifting off in bed, or warping through the air as though it were warm water, or maybe the feeling of cupping utter oblivion in his hands with the Ring of Lucii—except it nourishes his soul instead of steals it.

Zegnautus Keep has been witness to Noctis endlessly searching for Prompto, a dogged determination that seemed to start somewhere deep in him he couldn’t quantify. So maybe it was that. Maybe it was that, dragging Prompto through: that ferocity of the Luciian line connecting him with intention.

Noctis shudders to think if they never get this right, if they’re always running, if they’re always searching for a way to stop Ardyn because he, Noctis, won’t stay dead—because he becomes the ancient monster who won’t rest and won’t stop.

“Prompto?” he says, again, just before the room he knows where they’ll find the machine sapping Noctis’ magic of his blood. All of it has become routine.

“Yeah?”

“If we don’t make it out of this alive, this time,” he continues, terror churning through him at the thought, “and it starts again, all over again, will you find me?”

Prompto smiles, hands curling over the belt around his jeans. He tilts his head. “What, you think I give up that easy?”

A pleasant shudder runs through him, cutting converse to his fear that he becomes something immortal and awful, reliving Zegnautus Keep again and again. It is a duality he is scared of.

“Just checking.” Pausing, Noctis considers to add, “Have you found enough food in the sleep stations?”

“I’ve been fine. Gotta keep my strength up.”

“Are you sure?”

Prompto doesn’t look at him, and he sighs.

“Guess now isn’t the time, is it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I still worry.”

“You have much more important things to do,” Prompto says, as if that’s true, as if that was ever true. The mood shift throws Noctis off, so he grabs Prompto’s arm before he can walk away.

“Prom,” he says.

“The Crystal, Noct.”

“No. I need you to understand something,” he says, speaking to the back of Prompto’s head. “I know before I was caught up. In fate. In…being king. I thought it was the only right way to stop the darkness. But you have to know why I took this chance again.”

“Because you died,” Prompto says, seriously.

Noctis is trying to not choke on having to voice things he feels. It’s so hard. It’s so hard to just even admit the smallest thing _. You mean so much to me. I keep fighting. I just keep fighting and I can’t stop._

“That had something to do with it. But you remember what you said to me when I first found you?”

“Needed you to tell me I was real,” Prompto replies, quickly, not missing a beat. His tone is flat.

“I need you to tell me I’m real.”

He turns.

“Please. Just tell me I’m me. I’m Noctis.”

“What do you mean?”

“Who do you think I am?” Noctis asks, in just the same questioning tone.

“I think you’re you. You’ve never not been you. Noctis,” Prompto says, readily, as if he’s been waiting for this question for the longest time.

“Just me.”

“Just you,” he says heavily. There’s a sentimental half-smile on his face, as he punches Noctis in the arm. “Always you.”

“I think we’ve got something to go shoot at, Prompto.”

“Indeed we do.”

They start walking off together, bodies in _sympatico._

 

*

 

It doesn’t go as fluidly as Noctis hopes it would. It wasn’t easy the first time; isn’t the second. Prompto, at least, doesn’t even flinch as he uses his security pass as an MT test subject to get through. (Noctis wants to ask how he got comfortable. Wants to know what he missed out on).

Standing there, bodies interspersing the area, Prompto stares at Noctis and says, “No going back now!”

“I guess not.”

“But we’ve gotta fight Ravus.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t have Gladio and Ignis.”

“ _Yeah,_ ” Prompto drags out. “Listen, do you think we can do this?”

“There’s no ‘think’ about it. We’ve got to do it.”

“Same as ever,” Prompto mutters. Noctis warp-strikes away.

“Sorry? What were you saying?”

“You are the actual worst! Wait for me!”

Humming along, Noctis dawdles and does actually wait for Prompto to catch up. He strolls as if he’s not in the situation he actually is in. It’s easy to forget, for a moment.

“You know,” Prompto says, knocking his shoulder against Noctis’, “I’m sure we could do it. Together. As a team. I definitely don’t forget how often I was by myself in those other times. ‘Other times’ is kinda a weirdly brusque way to describe it, don’t you think? Anyway. I even got good at driving. I was _capable_.”

“No way,” Noctis says, enjoying the feeling of putting off whatever came next. “You? Good at _driving_?”

“Uh huh.”

“Are you sure that part wasn’t actually just a dream?”

“So funny,” Prompto mutters, “he thinks he’s _hilarious_.”

“I heard you. I could have you beheaded.”

“That’s archaic.”

“Lucis still has a monarchy, _that’s_ archaic,” Noctis says, and if he’s repeating what he used to hear whispered around the city, then that’s between him and Prompto and the Crystal he’s going to do something about.

“You really think so?” Prompto says, switching to a serious expression and reverent gaze.

“Some people do. And it’s not like magic should really decide who leads,” he says. “But maybe that’s just me being too lazy to rule a country.”

“To be fair, when you were dead…” Prompto trails off, leaving his sentence hanging. His face puckers. “There was nobody left to rule at all, anyway. So it’s the same product, right? Whatever happens next. We have to find a way without you.”

“ _You_ don’t,” Noctis says, solemn. There, they stand in the facility where everything is grey or drenched in sickly light or dead, waiting to be dead, and yet he could not care.

“Oh,” Prompto says, as if it’s a surprise, as if he never expected an answer like that. Faintly, he flushes, looking away. “That’s always handy,” he tries.

They walk silently. Noctis worries at how heavy-handed he may have been, in his last remark, if maybe it was too sentimental or emotional or just _too much_. He doesn’t have a firm rote of measurement.

“Ardyn’s oddly quiet,” Prompto says, nonchalant.

More MT’s grab them, ending the thread of conversation prematurely. They leap out, unexpectedly. In that moment of fighting he almost sees something like a grin on Prompto’s face as they work synchronistically; he knows when to dive behind Prompto and when to pull the other up. He never had time to miss it, but he thinks Prompto did.

 “I know,” Noctis says, breathing heavily and continuing the conversation as if they were never interrupted. “I can’t figure out why.”

“Yeah,” Prompto replies, gaze lowering to the ground, oddly monosyllabic.

“Prompto? Are you hurt?” On instinct, Noctis asks this just to be certain. Something is up and he doesn’t quite know what, as he understands Prompto’s body language now by habit.

“No. I’m fine. Just thinking.”

“About?”

“Ardyn,” Prompto heavily says. He shakes his head, as if to clear it. “It’s nice to fight with you again. After so long.”

Noctis grins, because he already knows this.

They find their way to the stage of the battle, and there’s _no Ravus._ His body is somewhere else and left untouched, no possession or corruption, at least to what they should know. The whole facility’s stagnancy stands out, right there, in the moment they expect to happen. Despite the empty moment they stand side-by-side and wait. And wait.

“I even just got my weapons back,” Noctis says.

“Did we just work ourselves up for nothing?”

“I think there are still things to be worked up about.”

“Crystal’s nothing, man.”

Their conversation drifts off as Noctis walks ahead, no urgency to get through—no closing doors to act in haste for. It’s all so calm. It’s like everything he thought this moment would be has utterly undone itself, loose thread spilling.

Prompto’s hand grasps the back of his shirt, still moving, just closer than before. Taking a leap, Noctis uses his left hand to grab Prompto’s instead. His palm is the most stable, firmest weight he’s felt. _This is enough_.

The bridge to the Crystal is longer than he remembers, a great runway down to the last seat of power in Eos.

“Do you think it actually looks like a Crystal?” Prompto asks. Briefly, Noctis turns to look at him bathed in blue light. He is angelic.

“I think it kinda looks more like a geode,” Noctis says, tilting his head. “Don’t you think?”

“Yeah. I do.” Then he giggles.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing. So how do we exactly, uh, destroy the Crystal? I feel like we didn’t think this through.”

Noctis tightens his hold on Prompto’s hand automatically. He’s nervous.

“To tell you the truth, boys,” Ardyn’s voice rings behind them, and they both turn to the missing member of their journey. Their hands release, but Prompto’s opposite hand grabs for Noctis’ other, and it’s such a simple, obvious motion. “I don’t think you’ll be doing that today.”

“No. I don’t think I will.”

“ _Noct_ ,” Prompto hisses.

“Just trust me,” he whispers back. Prompto squints at him.

The three of them standing on the long bridge leading to the Crystal say nothing. A faint humming sound emanates from behind Noctis and Prompto.

Over Ardyn’s shoulder, past his smug face, Noctis recognises two familiar faces as they make their entrance.

“We certainly do have timing,” Ignis says, voice projected.

“Stylish,” Gladio adds, sword balancing on his shoulder. Noctis could faint at the sight of them.

“And we’re all reunited,” Ardyn says, “how joyous.”

“I’m trusting you,” Prompto whispers again near Noctis’ ear, the minor height difference hardly making a difference to how close he is.

“Well, gentlemen?”

Here goes nothing. This is what it all culminates to. “You want to challenge the king,” Noctis says, trying for a powerful voice, a sure tone, “then there’s nobody to challenge. There is no king. This won’t end until somebody chooses to stop.”

Ardyn tilts his head and looks curiously at Noctis, then at Prompto, and back again. His back’s to the other two of the squad. He’s practically cornered. “So you do, at least, know how to give up occasionally.”

Prompto laughs. Prompto _laughs_ , and Noctis can only stare. “You have no idea, dude,” he says.

Blinking, almost surprised, Noctis didn’t expect Prompto _laugh_ at _Ardyn_. He was so suspicious and wary of him.

“Certainly not what I have seen so far,” Ardyn continues, as if Prompto’s laughing hadn’t just happened. “The first time, Noct, I was truly mesmerised by your ability to do exactly what you’re told. It truly was amusing.”

That old, cold fear creeps in and puts its claws into his shoulders, his neck, his throat. Ardyn can’t exert control over this cycle—or perhaps he could, if the first time in his misadventures post-mortem is anything to say. So it’s the feud between kings, all over again.

It just puzzles him why Ardyn hasn’t done anything to the same effect again. Playing with his meal before he eats it. How laughable it would be, to watch another like him repeating it all, too. The ultimate prison and revenge.

“Wipe that look off your face. It’s quite _pathetic_ ,” Ardyn drawls. “I did not expect you to come so far. Either of you, really. I didn’t even pull dear Prompto through. That was because of your fixation on him the whole time. What a privilege.”

It’s a stand-off.

“Do you think declaring yourself and setting the crown down would be enough?” Ardyn cups his hands together, hair jostling with the shaking of his head. “Because it wasn’t.”

“No. I know,” Prompto answers instead. “Remember what I said?” His grip tightens in Noctis’ palm. It’s a grounding act for himself, yet Noctis is thankful, too.

“I do know.” Ardyn sighs. “It’s been particularly entertaining. As I told you.”

“You let us come here unhindered.”

“That I did.”

“Why?” Prompto asks, boldly.

“Because,” Ardyn says, sounding _defeated,_ sounding _weary,_ like he’s asking and waiting for the last strike. “You’re _right_. You are terribly, terribly right. I remember rudely dying, and then not being dead because the latest King of Lucis decided death wasn’t good enough for him and I remembered: we are all tied to the Crystal, whether we like it or not, and we are all tied to the magic that runs in our blood even when our vessels are dead. So he dragged me back, as well—very selfish of you, Noct. And that is all I know. That I lived, for a long time, waiting. Waiting out of _spite_.”

“Talk about a monologue,” Prompto says.

“I do like the sound of myself talking,” Ardyn casually says. “I’m not afraid to _admit_ it.”

Continuing as if they hadn’t detoured for a moment, Prompto says, as if to a child, “You know what _I_ waited for.”  He’s not missing a beat. Noctis is, slightly, in awe; not because he never expected this, but because he’s _wanted_ to see something like this.

“In detail.”

Releasing his hand, Prompto turns to Noctis. “Trust me?” he says, face entirely earnest.

“Like you need to ask.”

So he walks up, leaves Noctis standing near the Crystal—he watches his back, terrified. No one moves, as Prompto’s steps ring out the room, hitting on the grate floor.

Then, shockingly—Noctis did not expect this—he hugs Ardyn.

“It’s all right,” Prompto hears him say. “I’m sorry your people and the Crystal rejected you. I’m sorry you were alone. I know what it’s like.”

“Well,” Ardyn says, fake-sniffling—Noctis can’t actually see any tears, “I never did like the Crystal particularly much. I suppose I’ll...well. I’ll direct my ire elsewhere, as it were. Lest you keep bringing me back.”

Dimly, he hears Gladio gasp. “I don’t—” Noctis says, wanting to inch closer, the need to pull Prompto away from a knife in the gut wrestling with the bone-deep trust he feels, “I don’t understand.”

“He’s utterly, utterly useless,” Ardyn says, “don’t forget that. But he worked on me like a little project. Took pity. Honestly, he’s the more diplomatic of you two. I’m very glad you’re giving up the throne. All along, you could have tried to be nice to me!”

“Prompto,” Noctis says, cautiously.

He doesn’t forget the Crystal behind him. Its presence is a reminder of the chain it holds on him.

“This has gotta end, Noct,” Prompto says, parting from Ardyn, the hug, and turning.

“I know. I never wanted to _not_ save the world. I just wanted to have more time. I just wanted to have another chance.” Shaking his head, Noctis can’t quite meet Prompto’s firm gaze.

“Okay. Great? I knew that already.”

“So?”

“Can you two communicate effectively?” Ardyn asks. “Or do I need to intervene? Here. I’ll go ahead anyway. I’m going to destroy the Crystal for you, Noct, because evidently you have put down your arms, you won’t be having any children by blood—”

“Did he just…” Noctis interrupts, and Prompto blooms red.

“Anyhow,” continuing, Ardyn says, “no children, which means I have nobody else to challenge considering I had your father offed, and therefore it’s the Crystal I have to take my anger out on because it rejected me. And our magic is intrinsically tied to it and _you_ will keep repeating this cycle if I sit here and do nothing.”

“The other kings will always linger as well,” Noctis says, pointedly ignoring the comment about Regis because they might very well be onto something here. “They won’t know rest.”

“Yes, well—I’m not doing this out of compassion. You are just annoyingly stubborn. And Prompto convinced me eternity is rather boring and lonely, etcetera etcetera. Frankly, the emotionality of it makes me want to vomit.”

“It totally worked though,” Prompto says. “Totally not useless.”

Noctis wants to ask him to hold his hand again.

“You defeated me with the power of love and determination rather than your fists. Well done.”

“Yes. Love,” Prompto squeaks. “Love for my _friend_. Friend _s._ Plural. Never giving up for the good of the world.”

“Are we dragging this out enough or should I just get on with it?”

“Your magic is cool,” Prompto says, going back and grabbing Noctis by the wrist, pulling him away from the Crystal. Ardyn brushes past with a _cat-got-the-cream_ kind of yellow-teethed grin, but Noctis thinks he always just smiles like that. “But it _kinda_ has a laundry list of consequences.”

“You mean the ring that saps my soul, the ability to summon the souls of past kings and keep them from eternal slumber, or the part where I have to sleep inside the Crystal for ten years just to harness its power? Or the part where I have to die to use it? Or how it stops me from ever dying properly?”

Humming, Prompto pretends to think. “Yeah. I thought about it. Basically, all of that.”

“I just,” Noctis says, sighing, “think it’s not worth it.”

He’d watched his father’s life slowly sapped from him, and Noctis wishes he could just live. Just accept chaos.

With a slight _tink_ of finality, he takes the Ring of Lucii and drops it upon the ground. “No more,” he mutters, and crushes it with his foot. The action does not possess the _gravitas_ he hoped it would, and the ring actually doesn’t crack. He drags a sword out from the aether and pierces it. Amusedly, Prompto watches his attempt at trying to destroy the ring.

“Well,” Ardyn says, tipping the hat he magically summoned, “I suppose I ought to leave with something witty to say, don’t you think?

“Go,” Prompto says.

“Go,” Noctis repeats, with all the passion he can enforce. “Destroy the Crystal and end the cycle. Take the Starscourge away. Let this land see light again.”

Smirking, Ardyn tilts his head.  “Wait for the sunrise,” he says. “And please, die quietly, one day. Without dragging me back. Again.”

“The Kings of Lucis have never known complete rest,” Noctis says, “maybe now they will.”

“Hate to kill the moment and your dramatic posturing, but you actually can’t stand there and watch. Unless you want to die _loudly_. Get out.”

He shoos them, as if they’re children hanging in the kitchen, waiting for dinner before it’s ready.

“Do you think,” Noctis says, voice losing its steadiness as he breathes carefully, running away, “we should trust him?”

“Noct, _Noct_!” Prompto replies, full of bouncing joy, “We could always just do it again!”

“Again, and again,” Noctis agrees.

“You are both explaining this later. Understand?” Gladio says. “Thoroughly. Why do I remember three different things happening and _not happening_. I was engaged. What did you two _do_.”

It’s a not-question because his tone belies disbelief and a strange mix of disappointment and admiration that only Gladio could ever conjure.

Ardyn’s voice rings throughout the room again, as they move down corridors with precision in their steps, “We did already part ways, but I ought to let you know where a shortcut to an exit is. To save you the hassle. And my waiting around. It’s in my self-interest, as this all has been.”

“I killed him once,” Noctis says, lowly, as if Ardyn couldn’t hear him anyway.

“I am very well aware. But I didn’t die, technically speaking. I am ever the pedant.”

He tells them where to go, anyway, even if he’s an old and corrupted king. But the kings of Lucis apparently had soft spots for Prompto Argentum and being confronted by the terror of eternity and death and life.

“So, uh,” Gladio tries, looking utterly shocked, “you’re not king anymore, huh?”

“About that,” Noctis says, and then doesn’t finish.

He might have just changed history, and brought himself back to life with nails digging into the walls of the mortal realm and crushing crystals beneath his glove. Ardyn had clung to the world out of hate.

Noctis, out of love. The word that encapsulates all the things he can’t bring himself to say, yet boils below the surface with all the ferocity of tucked away emotion, behind lock and key.

 

*

 

The whole thing is: Noctis, for all his knowledge of weapons and power, his malleable abilities, his magic—it didn’t come down to that.

He’d blustered his way through destiny. Through the searing knowledge he had to die, that he’d have to leave all of it beyond. Said goodbye more than once. They saved the world despite.

The Crystal is beautiful, as it buries itself into Eos’ lower crust. The whole sky had been the deepest crystalline colour for the most pure handful of seconds. Noctis watches it, arm partially shielding his face as he stands outside.

He had not touched the Crystal; the Crystal had dug its own grave. Ardyn had maybe destroyed it with his power, or his corruption, or maybe it had taken the Crystal learning it had nothing to offer, anymore, for it to be the fourth Crystal to combust.

Zegnautus Keep is levelled, and the rest of the world is safe. Predawn light spills over the horizon as they lie panting with freshly remade limbs and lungs, fresh and clean and promising.

“You weren’t here for it,” Prompto says, “last time. But you can see it now, right? If you bother to sit up.”

Pushing himself up stiffly, Noctis accepts Prompto’s hand. The four of them turn their heads up, and watch the pearlescent turn of the sky as the first rays colour the clouds baby pink.

Later, Ignis says, “The sun is warm,” when the day heats up insistently. He shrugs off his jacket and lazily hangs it over his shoulder as they hunt for supplies before making leave. “I had almost forgotten."

“It is,” Prompto agrees, grinning. He’s the picture of contentment with his arms swinging at his side. He’s staring at Noctis, like he had cupped the sun and dragged it back himself. He had, in way. The city is cold and foreign territory and he looks happy.

 

*

 

“Can’t believe we’re back here,” Prompto says, arms behind his head. The lobby of the hotel in Lestallum feels anticlimactic, after they’d made their gradual way back from Gralea and Zegnautus Keep. The trek had been arduous, but the other three seemed to know what they were doing. They’d done it before, of course—the world had snapped back like a rubberband and the futures-that-never-were had merged themselves.

Noctis finds it all very complicated. Even more unbelievable: he’s alive, or it’s a good facsimile of it. Luna seemed to believe it was all real. He trusts her.

So all of it has been wiped clean, the land still fresh and untainted by ten years of food shortages and daemon infestations like cockcroaches, people having to become warriors who were never meant to stare down blood everyday.

He’s a part of this new world, now.

Gladio and Ignis head up to their booked room, but Prompto and Noctis hang around, unsure, in the lobby.

“So,” Noctis tries to start, but finds himself floundering. His hands are in his pockets, casual jeans because his other solitary outfit is in sore need of washing. It’s a mundane thing to think about.

“ _So_ ,” Prompto says, just to mock him.

They haven’t talked about handholding or what Ardyn indirectly implied, not since they’ve been steadily making their way back to the Crown City. It’s the reverse of their initial journey, tracing their old footsteps and haunts.  

Once they had stood in here where Noctis’ head had been knocked by indecipherable messages from Titan, and he remembers Iris taking him for a walk around the city with lackadaisical care. It’s a pit-stop on their journey home.

“Do you wanna…get something to eat?” Noctis says, ever so eloquently.

“We already did that.” Prompto looks amused.

“I mean, you know. A treat or something.”

“Could just walk around.” Taking off, he drags Noctis by the forearm out the door, swinging it open out into the night. “Need to stretch your legs after those long car rides in stolen cars.”

The Regalia's broken, left behind where it had first died, but he’s going to ask Cindy a big, big favour, eventually.

The maroon top Prompto’s wearing distracts him as they slip out. It clings to him, pronouncing his biceps—Noctis has always noticed, but he _notices._

Truly, Noctis has set himself for a worse fate. Because after all of it, he hadn’t quite anticipated the consequence of his actions: he’d return to _this_ , and never really know if it’s reciprocated.

The thought terrifies him. That he could come so far and lose it over one small thing. There’s a country left to rebuild, a government to institute, a nation to mourn. Going through it all in his head, he knows the Imperial military is bust—so whether the war is over, he’s not sure, but he’s certain enough that there’s time to bring the Crown City back up from the dust.

The world never suffered those long ten years. It’s all so possible. But what’s close to him, he’s more uncertain about than a kingdom.

“Are you stuck in your head again, Noct?” Prompto says, gently knocking his shoulder against Noctis’. It all feels surreal, and he’d spent time in the liminal space of a train to death.

Even now, it’s surprising. The Starscourge is gone. The Crystal remains sleeping. The light has come back.

All of Lestallum is vibrant and alive, many having flocked there to thank the women who had stepped out from the veil, built their own light, gave homes to the ones who needed it. Fought off the darkness themselves, when nobody else could.

He looks around the town, with its vivid-coloured buildings and lights and bustling market area, so homely and different to the black brutalism of Insomnia.  His city could do with some colour, he decides. That can be the next change.

Then he returns his gaze to Prompto. He’s snapping an artful display of the strewn lights down the alleyway, the disused corner of the town bright instead of unlit as a reminder. There’s a symbolism there he understands. The darkness has been a hard thing to fathom, a thing to still fear.

Prompto turns to Noctis and smiles, coy, walking on ahead as though Noctis isn’t burning inside. There are two choices he has: he can never mention anything, save it inside himself or he, in the middle of his mortal meditiations, could do something. Say something.

As he made the decision once to board that train, he copies the resolution and chooses the thing that scares him most and remains unknowable.

“Prompto,” he says, not moving, stock still, because he has to get this right. He doesn’t get any do-overs. Eyes open wide, he’s walking into this and he’s going to take this opportunity. He has the choice to.

“Yeah?”  expectantly Prompto replies, pocketing the camera. He holds in his elbow in one hand, missing Noctis’ gaze by an inch. The expression on his face is inscrutable.

“Did you know it never occurred to me to go for the Crystal first?”

“I guess we’re talking about this, then,” Prompto says.

Rolling his eyes, Noctis grabs Prompto by the shoulders, holds him at arm’s length. Prompto’s expression is _surprised._

“Wait,” Noctis stalls, as he takes the brim of his hat in hand and twists it, so it isn’t prepared to hit Prompto in the face. That would be a definite mood killer. He swallows, unsteady yet simultaneously so certain of this feeling and his gut. He has to do this.

He could walk away from this, give Prompto his space if it didn’t work out.  Death really puts things into perspective, lets you know your limit. This is easy.

 _Being_ with Prompto is easy. Introducing an outlier into the equation is where he flounders; it’s like the fate of _his_ world, this time, hinges on this, and there are countless ways it could go and he will only know one.

Prompto’s shoulders, beneath his hands, are grounding. Up close he can see the sunspot on his chin and the blush of his skin.

The blush.

“I died twice. I came back each time,” he carefully says. “I came back.”

“I know, Noct.”

He just can’t get a read on the situation. Here he thought he knew Prompto _well_.

“Then if you know, tell me why I took advantage of the opportunity _,_ ” he insists.

“Because you deserve a better fate. Because you’re more than a king,” Prompto says, as if the answer is rehearsed, as if he’s known it for years. There’s no joking answer on hand. “I told you. You’re real.”

“Why did I want a better fate?”

“Not a lot of people wanna die. It’s pretty simple stuff.”

“ _No_. _No_ ,” Noctis says, sliding his left hand to Prompto’s waist, more of a soft and loving touch than he’s ever let himself take. There are no joking words here and banter to soothe the tension. “Because I knew what it was like to leave something behind.”

“ _Dude_.” Prompto’s face is shocked, and for one awful moment he thinks it’s rejection. “ _Dude_.”

There. All of it bubbling below the surface, it rises with ruthless ambition, the untempered reality of the things he refused to admit and the things he struggles so much to say.

“Prompto,” Noctis says. “I—I.” He sighs. “What is ‘dude’ even supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m kinda lost for words. I mean, I could fill the silence? Whatever will you do, O king, with me running my mouth _now_ —”

The once-king was busy licking his lips before he kissed Prompto. It’s tender, the simplest press of lips. The touch of lips is one he had never understood, could not be put into words—there is an intimacy to it he’s learning in the contact. There is no  comparison to the touch. He draws back, incrementally, attempting to gauge Prompto’s reaction—an afterthought, he realises with a touch of shame, to the instinctive impulse.

Now he just doesn’t know what to do next, their faces so close their breaths intermingled, bright lights reflected in Prompto’s wide eyes. “Say something?” he says, trying to prompt Prompto into a response, into _something_. The moment is killing him, however precious and finite it is. Perfectly fragile.

Prompto draws a hand up, runs his index finger along Noctis’ jaw, finishes by cupping it with his palm.

“At least let me know what you’re thinking?” Noctis tries again.

“Sorry. I don’t actually believe this is happening, so you have to give me a minute for my brain to reboot,” Prompto says. “Only so much I can process, y’know?”

“Right.”

“Way to overstate it.”

So Noctis kisses him again. He’s new to it, trying to get his bearings, but he doesn’t knock his teeth against Prompto’s so he figures he’s doing okay. He hopes. Kissing is different from fighting. A battle is raw in the same way, both need knowledge of the body, but they are on completely different planes.

It’s sweet, and so, so precious.

Until Prompto dives in with his _tongue_ , and Noctis is both wholly unprepared and completely ready for it anyway. It turns slick and messy in a way Noctis never understood kisses could feel—hastening in intensity and teaching him what the big deal with kissing was. With Prompto. He understands what it feels like to have a body against him in this way—to have his own recognise it, right back, with that primordial instinct.

Drawing back, Prompto giggles. He _giggles_. “Are we really making out in an alleyway in Lestallum?”

“I’d take you somewhere fancy,” Noctis says, not doing a particularly good job of ignoring how _close_ they are, how much he wants to _stick his tongue down Prompto’s throat again_ , “but I don’t think you’re that classy—”

Prompto smacks a kiss against his mouth. At Noctis’ mock-upset expression, he says, “Yeah. That’s how it’s gonna be. You start mouthing off and I’m just shut you up with my _tongue_. Goes both ways, though.”

Noctis gulps. “Is that supposed to be incentive not to ‘mouth off’?”

“Meh, I figure it’s win-win.” A sigh follows. Prompto places both his hands upon Noctis’ chest, resting just over his heart. “Y’know we’re going to have to have a _talk_ about this.”

“You know I’m not very good with…” Noctis trails off, highlighting his point, but finishes eventually as Prompto encouragingly waits. “Words. Emotions.”

“Better at actions, I know,” Prompto says, and winks. Then his face turns serious—the appearance of that quick, almost temperamental transformation he could take between light and joking and wholly earnest and sentimental. “Just tell me if you want me.” The words seem like they’re wrenched from him, looking down, not meeting Noctis’ intense gaze.

“I want you,” Noctis says quietly, without even thinking—the words tumbling out—letting his own hands join Prompto’s and rest atop them. He knows the shape and position of each sunspot beneath where his own palms rest.

Prompto takes a deep breath, and moves away to lean against the wall. Noctis follows suit, slipping in a sneaky arm and holding Prompto to him. He’s proud of how he was almost subtle.

“Do you remember that time when you were doing that annoying thing where you walk around brushing your teeth, instead of staying in the bathroom,” Prompto starts, seemingly changing topic, “at my house, and you’d been doing it for so long you got distracted with how much like, toothpaste had bubbled up in your mouth? And then it hit the back of your throat and you choked and then spat it _all over the floor_ , and the toothbrush hit the wall it went flying so far?”

Grimacing, Noctis nods. “I do remember that. Unfortunately. You’re not allowed to repeat it.”

“I’m disappointed I didn’t get it on film,” Prompto mutters. “Anyway. You were a full grown adult—given, I’ll be nice, we were 18—you _did_ that. I might’ve expected it from a 12 year old—”

“Prompto.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay. I’m not just bringing this for old times’ sake. Not that it’s that long ago and something like that _will_ definitely happen again because you _still_ walk around with your toothbrush for _ever_ —”

“ _Prompto!_ ”

“That was when I realised how much I wanted you more than I should have. There. That’s the end of the story, Noct. I did have a point,” Prompto says. “Also, I just wanted to remind you of that time when you _choked_ on _toothpaste_.”

“So you’re hopelessly in love with because of that,” Noctis says, because he’s lost his filter somewhere between the last couple of steps since their kiss and where they’re leaning.

“ _Noctis_.” Prompto turns bright red and it takes all of Noctis’ willpower to not pinch his cheeks. It’s a close thing. It’s an old urge. For just a hot minute, Noctis thinks he’s said too much. But then, curiously, Prompto says, “No. No, I’m not.”

Noctis understands. Better that Prompto know his own feelings, and know how to name them and voice them. He swallows.

“Because,” Prompto says, a mischievous glint in his eyes with that grin which makes him look not so innocent, “it’s the most hopeful thing I’ve ever felt.”

Silent and stationary, Noctis blinks.

“I’m _hopefully_ in love with you. Not hope _lessly_. Do you get it?”

Those words sit, and hang in the air with a refusal to leave. Softly, he could imagine those words hanging on the hung up lights Prompto had photographed, each word woven between.

“Oh,” he says, for once, with nothing to quip back.

Noctis needs to be direct. He has to get this _right_. For him, it’s all the way. It’s hard, and he’ll override it; he can, for this.

So he cups Prompto’s face, and he makes solid eye contact. It’s all about projecting confidence. The way a king holds himself, controlling the tremour of his hand, the steadiness of his gaze, is more important than having to say anything.

Peeling back his skin and poking at the raw, deeper layers, is what this feels like. “If you want, marry me.”

He might’ve gone overboard with that. It’s either choked up or flooding out. Prompto’s face is indiscernible again, that shocked-insecure-pink flushed combination he’s seen since a handful of times in knowing him.

“To be fair,” Noctis tries to defend himself, “usually my dad did this kind of thing for me.”

Then the flicker of insecurity and self-doubt disappears and Prompto looks _determined._ That set line of his lips, slight furrow of his eyebrows.

“Married,” Prompto says. “You couldn’t just say ‘I love you’ like a normal person. You ask me for my hand in marriage—”

“I said if you _wanted_ to—”

”—Noct, _Noctis._ ” A smile blooms, the genuine one that makes Noctis want to smile with him. It was all so worth it. “Tell me that wasn’t a proposal.”

“I don’t have a ring,” he says, and grimaces at the thought of the Ring of Lucii.

“Go buy one then,” Prompto says, and slips sneakily out from Noctis’ orbit. Noctis follows.

“Now?”

“Tomorrow, then. If you _meant it!_ ”

“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”

“Or,” Prompto says, finger under his chin, “you’re just not sure how to manage your life without being engaged or preparing for a wedding.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, that was arranged.”

“You mean you _didn’t_ get down on your knee for Luna? Then what are you waiting for?”

Noctis is going to get down on his knees for Prompto. He has no problem with it. He was prepared for a political marriage _already_. It’s not like they need to settle down.

“How many kids do you want?” Noctis asks, getting down on his _actual knee_. He is _proposing._

 _“_ I—uh—haven’t given it much thought? How many do _you_ want?”

“I like working with them, but I don’t know about having any.”

“Uh huh.” Prompto nods vigorously. He’s gone pink again. “My parents already like you.”

Blinking, Noctis tries to think of a way to add to that that’s relevant to his own personal situation. He decides on, “My parents are dead.”

“Oh, jeez. We mentioned your dead parents at our engagement.”

“It’s fine. You know me,” Noctis says.

“Anything else you can think of? I know you steal the covers. Frankly, I don’t think I can go through with this just based on that.”

He snorts. “And you leave wet towels on the bed. We’re even.”

“Wet towels are nothing compared to that,” Prompto says, mock-offended. “Have we gone over everything?”

With great care, Noctis takes Prompto’s hand; he falls silent, in turn.

“Are we actually doing this?” Prompto whispers, as if there are people watching, expecting them to play it out perfectly.

“Yes, we _are_ ,” Noctis says. “Unless you’re not sure.”

“No, go ahead, by all means.”

He clears his throat and tries to think straight. “I’m not looking to unite our kingdoms.”

Prompto can hardly hold eye contact, but he’s managing it, as he lets out an incredulous laugh. At least as far as Noctis can see.

“In fact, there’s really no reason I _need_ to be married—”

Balefully, Prompto says, “Are you seriously doing this to me?” The question is flat.

“I just _want_ to be. Because marriage is for—being in—you know, not—for diplomacy.”

“What if we don’t have the same taste in _sex_ ,” Prompto blurts, suddenly. “I’m sorry! I just literally thought of it! We haven’t even _done_ anything yet!”

Noctis, taken somewhat aback but not at all upset, considers this. “You’re right. We could always just go and check now. It’s a solution, right?”

“I think I might faint.”

“As long as you don’t ever grow a goatee again, I’m sure about this.”

“Hey,” Prompto says, “you can’t propose to me _and_ insult the facial hair I didn’t technically-ever-have-though-it-happened.”

“Yes, I can, it’s a taste of what you get when you marry me.”

“Well, ask me properly then!”

“Prompto. Marry me.”

Prompto yanks Noctis up with searing force and kisses his forehead, his cheeks, his jaw, and then finally his lips. “Yes. Like you even need me to say it.”

“I do need you to say it,” he says.

“Oh, no, _gosh,_ are we going to have to organise a _wedding_?”

“I usually left that up to someone else.”

“Who’s going to do the _cooking_ around the house—”

“We could hire Ignis?”

Prompto thinks about it. Noctis knows that look, too. He’s genuinely considering it.

“We can’t hire Ignis,” Noctis adds.

“Is Gladio going to beat me up?”

“Gladio isn’t going to beat you up. You know he likes you,” Noctis says, as if it’s obvious. Because it is. If you know Gladio.

“I should have asked _that_ before I agreed,” Prompto mutters, then holds Noctis close. “We’re getting _mar-ried_ ,” he then sing-songs.

 

*

 

“We leave you alone for an hour,” Gladio says, gripping the bridge of his nose. Noctis holds Prompto’s hand.

Beside Gladio, Ignis shucks off his shoes. There’s a fond smile playing on his face. “So, between the two of you, you virtually change history, change Eos, undo ten years of darkness, and decide to help build Lucis a new governmental system. Then you get engaged. I must commend you.”

“Couldn’t do it without you guys, to be honest,” he says. It’s true. If he never had them, if he never had people to believe in him and to help him, he doesn’t know where he’d be. “It’s why I’m still here, after all.”

“I am happy,” Ignis says, carefully, “for the both of you.”

“We even discussed all the things you should do before marriage!” Prompto says, bouncing off to flop down beside Ignis. He puts an arm around his shoulder. “You should be proud of us, Iggy.”

“Indeed we are,” Ignis says. “Although I do not know if a wedding is possible under our budget.”

Prompto and Noctis stare at each other, slightly horrified. _Budget_? Prompto mouths.

“I suspect most of what we have accumulated will be used in the rebuilding of Insomnia, and the rest for our basic expenses. Of course, you could partake in some extra hunting to round out the difference. Are you planning a private or public wedding? Even if you officially resign as king, you are still a high-profile citizen, and most likely will still carry a seat of power as the system transfers from a monarchy. We must discuss, of course, what exactly it _is_ you expect to transition _to_ before we even begin to discuss, say, what colour the table cloths will be. That being said…”

Gladio cackles, bending over as he laughs at the end of the bed. His long hair hides his face bent near the red duvet.

“Thank you, Gladio. There was a provisional, emergency sort of government in the years of darkness we’ve not forgotten. So I presume there is something to work from there.”

“Why did you laugh?” Prompto asks Gladio, confused and sweet.

“Because you just got owned by Ignis,” Gladio says, wheezing. “He just _schooled_ you. Getting around thinking you’re adults. Honestly.”

“We _are_ adults,” Prompto says.

“All right, sugar plum.”

“That’s my fiancée. It’s illegal to be mean to him,” Noctis interjects. He crosses his arms and tries to project his kingly gaze, but he has a feeling it comes off more as angsty teen with a problem.

He’s too happy, is the problem.

This new light and new world he exists in—he feels like he’s burning, burning sunlight, could be molten like this forever.

He doesn’t need forever. Just this.

 

 

### EPILOGUE

 

 

Sleepy, just floating on the edge of wakefulness marred by fragments of his slumber, Prompto’s awoken by a chaste kiss as bright, unforgiving light filters through the motel room. Noctis leans across him, lazy loving eyes looking just as awake as Prompto. He laughs.

“Ugh,” Noctis says, pulling back and scrunching his nose up, “why does nobody mention how bad Sleeping Beauty’s breath must have been?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://twitter.com/rekantr/status/827841891559419906  
> BEAUTIFUL fanart by @rekantr. darling of my heart!
> 
> if you stood by me this far (haaaaaaaa) then, thank you.  
> thank you, sincerely, dear reader. i have a oneshot sort of crackfic to post soon, so ;) come talk to me on twitter @ http://www.twitter.com/4chanpriest (yeah i had to change my username. it's a long story).
> 
> i talk a lot in the replies to comments, so feel free to leave your own. thank you for joining me.
> 
> and you might be sitting there wondering---they're getting MARRIED? then where's the wedding road trip??
> 
> baby, just wait.


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